Subscribe once, never check again

Last week I wrote about why I’m building Retempo. The short version: keeping track of the things you care about shouldn’t require a dozen apps. This week I want to go deeper on how Retempo actually thinks about solving that problem.

Not a feature walkthrough. How I think about the product.

Subscribe once, never think about it again

Most apps make you search for things every time you want to know something. “When does Barcelona play next?” You Google it. You check the league app. You scroll through your club’s social media. You find the answer, close the app, and forget it until next week when you do the whole thing again.

That’s backwards.

If you care about FC Barcelona, you always care about FC Barcelona. You shouldn’t have to re-ask the same question every week. You should tell an app once — “I follow this team” — and then it just handles it.

That’s what subscribing to a calendar does in Retempo. You subscribe to FC Barcelona. From that point on, every match, every schedule change, every competition they’re in shows up in your feed automatically. You don’t search. You don’t check. You open the app and it’s there.

Same thing for everything else. Subscribe to Taylor Swift and you’ll know when tour dates get announced. Subscribe to a League of Legends tournament and the schedule is in your feed. Subscribe to the Premier League and every fixture, every postponement, every kickoff change is just there.

One action, once. That’s it.

Your location changes what matters

Here’s something most event apps ignore: where you are changes what’s relevant to you.

If you live in London and FC Barcelona is playing at Camp Nou on a Tuesday night, that’s worth knowing — it’s your team. But if a local jazz festival is happening in São Paulo, that’s probably not useful to you right now.

Retempo is location-aware. You save the places that matter to you — your city, your country, wherever — and your feed adjusts. Every event in Retempo has a relevance scope: some are local, some are national, some are global. Your feed combines what you’ve subscribed to with where you are and shows you what actually matters.

No manual filtering. It just works.

Not all notifications are equal

This one’s important to me. Most apps treat every notification the same: something happened, here’s a push notification, good luck.

But events don’t all work the same way. If a concert just got announced and tickets go on sale in three days, you need to know now. That timing matters — miss the on-sale window and you might miss the show entirely. But if there’s a football match next Thursday, you don’t need a notification five days out. A heads-up the day before is plenty.

Retempo’s notifications are aware of this. Music events notify early because ticket windows are real deadlines. Sports schedules notify closer to match day because that’s when the information becomes actionable. Different events, different timing. That’s it.

The opposite of a social network

There are no likes in Retempo. No comments. No profiles. No infinite scroll. No algorithm trying to keep you engaged for as long as possible.

Your feed is a list of upcoming events, sorted by date. You open it, you see what’s coming up, you close it. That’s the entire interaction.

I built it this way on purpose. I don’t want Retempo competing for your attention. Open, glance, done.

What this looks like in practice

Say you subscribe to three things: FC Barcelona, Billie Eilish, and Steam free game deals.

You open Retempo on a Tuesday morning. Barcelona vs. Atlético Madrid, Saturday at 21:00. Billie Eilish just added three London shows — presale opens Wednesday at 10am. Celeste is free on Steam until Thursday.

Three different worlds. One feed. Zero effort.

Not a wild new idea. Just the obvious thing that should have existed already.

More soon. Follow along on X/Twitter or check out retempo.app.

— Quim