The Outernet app turns your saved posts into an organised list of things to actually do, a premise that sounds obvious until you realise nobody has quite cracked it yet. Co-founders Danielle Egan and Athena Leong launched the iOS app roughly two months ago, and it has already reached around 18,000 users while turning a profit from its premium subscription tier.
From San Francisco Streets to Your Phone
The idea did not emerge from a whiteboard session. Egan and Leong spent years building elaborate real-world experiences in their spare time, all while holding full-time jobs in tech. CBS San Francisco reported that the pair were still in those day jobs when they poured their free time into organising Pursuit, a citywide scavenger hunt they co-created because, as Leong put it, ‘We really wanted a project that helps people get out and go explore the city.’
Pursuit began three years ago and is now held annually. The most recent edition drew participation from roughly 1.5% of San Francisco’s population, according to the founders. KQED reports that the 2025 edition, which kicked off on 12 July, also had a third co-creator, Riley Walz, alongside at least 12 other friends helping to make it happen. That edition ran a scout theme: participants earned patches by completing missions that dropped throughout the month.
When Egan and Leong talked with Pursuit participants, they kept hearing the same thing: people were not there because they loved scavenger hunts. They just wanted an excuse to leave the house. ‘We just realized that people really have an appetite for doing things, like going on adventures. This is the new trend,’ Leong said. That conversation seeded Outernet.
What the Outernet App Saved Posts Feature Actually Does
The core mechanic is straightforward. You are scrolling TikTok or Instagram, you see a bar, a local event, a weekend market. You save it to the platform and immediately forget about it, buried under the next fifty posts. Outernet sits in the share sheet of those apps, so instead of saving to an algorithm that will never surface it again, you send it there.
The app uses AI to extract the relevant details: date, time, location, a description. Events land in a chronological feed. Places without a date go into a separate tab. There is also a map view and calendar integration with Apple or Google Calendar. When you actually go somewhere, you ‘stamp’ it, building a record of what you have done. The founders are planning a passport-style feature so you can look back at completed adventures, and they are exploring gamification through milestone stamps.
Egan, whose background was in product BizOps at LinkedIn before Outernet, describes the product’s ambition as becoming the ‘motivation engine for IRL,’ removing the friction between wanting to do something and actually going out to do it. She also sees Outernet as a conduit for community organisers who are good at putting on events but not at reaching audiences: ‘There are these boots on the ground… incredible community organizers who are hosting these amazing events, and they just don’t know how to reach people because marketing and grabbing people’s attention is such a different skill set. And that’s something that we are exceptional in.’
Profitable Already, but Eyeing Investors
The app is currently invite-only and available on Apple iOS, with an Android waitlist running. The premium subscription costs $6.99 a month or $39.99 a year, unlocking a higher daily save limit, and the founders say the business is already profitable on that basis alone.
That profitability gives them negotiating room. Future Party reports the company is weighing outside investment to fuel growth beyond what subscriptions can sustain, though Leong is in no rush to take any cheque: ‘We want to bring on investors, if we do, [who are] people who are really aligned with us. We’re whimsical, and we have to find investors that match.’
There are competitors in the space, including Albo, Tabi and Plotline, all chasing a version of the same idea. Where Outernet makes its case is not in the feature set, which is solid but not wildly differentiated, but in who built it: two people who have spent years dragging San Franciscans off their sofas for the fun of it. Whether that founder credibility translates into lasting retention is the question the next 18,000 users will answer.
