Working prototype · Mexico City · September 2026

Chilangringos

Insider notes on Mexico City for the people who keep coming back.

Five days, four nights. Every place earned its spot.

This is built for the trip most people actually take: a long weekend stretched to five days. Anyone can generate a list of restaurants. What someone pays for is the judgement — which of the famous places are coasting, which stall inside the market is the one, which day the barbacoa spot is closed, and whether the street needs a rideshare after dark. Day one is free. The other four are $29.99 — or take just the restaurants, the bars, the coffee, the museums or the shops as a single guide for $8.99.

853Places on file
—Not in the guidebooks
—Flagged as overrated
—Only open certain days

The flow, end to end

Five steps. The only one that has to be perfect on day one is step 3 — everything else is plumbing you can buy off the shelf.

01 · ACQUIRE

The ad

Reel or TikTok in the format that already works for CDMX: the swap. "Everyone lines up here. Locals go two blocks that way."

Meta / TikTok / YouTube
02 · INTAKE

Build the trip

Nine questions, under 90 seconds, no account asked for yet. Answering is the thing that makes the account feel worth creating.

Tab 2 →
03 · SIGN UP

Day one, free

Log in and the first day unlocks in full — every place, every tip, nothing blurred. This is the proof, and it costs you a real day of the good stuff.

The gate
05 · EXPAND

Book time

A slot on the calendar with someone who lives here. Reservations, a driver, the table for nine — the things software can't do.

Where the margin is

Steps 1, 3 and 4 are a weekend with existing tools. Step 5 is a calendar link and a person. Step 2 is the only thing that can't be bought — and it's the only reason steps 3 and 5 work at all. The free day is the whole argument: nobody pays $29.99 for a blurred preview, but plenty will pay it once a real day has proved the judgement is worth having — and the $8.99 guides catch the people who only came for the restaurants.

What the price has to carry

Drag the assumptions. The bars are drawn to scale, so you can see where the funnel actually breaks.

Impressions
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Clicks
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Quiz starts
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Quizzes finished
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Accounts created
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Purchases
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Calls booked
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—Cost per buyer
—Product revenue
—Break-even buy rate
—Call revenue
—Net / month

What the research turned up

  • El Califa de León lost its Michelin star in May 2026 — and the "first Michelin taco in the world" clip is still driving the queue. That single fact is both the best ad hook and the best proof the product is current.
  • The peso moved. At ~17 MXN to the dollar, nearly every CDMX cost guide online understates dollar prices by 10–15%.
  • The World Cup is over (June–July 2026) and Estadio Azteca reopened at 87,500 seats as Estadio Banorte. Guides still framing CDMX as a host city bracing for crowds are stale.
  • 83 places in the database are day-restricted. Patrick Miller is Friday only. El Hidalguense is Friday to Sunday. Bazar Sábado is Saturday. Half the museums close Monday. A generic AI itinerary sends people to closed doors — this one can't.
  • The anti-gentrification sentiment in Roma and Condesa is live. The product handles it as competence, not politics: price in pesos, push spend outward, never call a working-class colonia undiscovered.

Where this breaks

  • Freshness is the whole moat and the whole liability. Restaurants close. A paid itinerary that sends someone to a shuttered door is a refund and a bad review. Budget for a quarterly re-verification pass from day one.
  • The verification pass found real rot. Of 151 medium-confidence records checked in September 2026: two permanently closed, two temporarily shut, two relocated, and 46 with the wrong closing day. That was three months after the research — plan on a quarterly pass, forever.
  • The login gate is the biggest single leak. Drag it from 55% to 80% and watch the whole funnel move — that one number is worth more than any amount of CPM optimization. It buys you an email address and a remarketing list, which is the argument for keeping it.
  • Everyone can generate a list. The defensible part is the 850-odd opinions — the trap flags, the swaps, the sell-out times. That's editorial work, not scraping.

Nine questions

This is the entire paid experience from the buyer's side. Everything below maps to a field in the database, which is why the output can be specific instead of generic.

01

When do you land, and when do you fly home?

Five days and four nights is the trip this is built for. Landing and departure times decide how much of the first and last day you actually get — and the day of the week matters more than people expect, because 83 places only exist on certain days. Staying longer than five? That is what the concierge call is for.

02

Who's going?

03

Have you been before?

04

How much does each of these matter?

Set a level for each. Skip keeps it out of the plan entirely; the top level bends the whole trip around it. The bar underneath shows what your days will be made of.

05

Daily budget, per person, food and activities

Not hotels. This shifts the whole plan up or down a price tier — and sets the currency your trip estimate comes back in.

06

How full do you want the days?

Mexico City lunch is 2–4pm and dinner starts at 9. A packed day here is longer than a packed day anywhere else.

07

Where are you staying?

Day one gets built around your neighborhood so you're not in traffic while jet-lagged and at 7,350 feet.

08

Anything we should work around?

09

Famous, or not famous?

The one question that changes the answer most. Nobody else asks it.

Hit the icons Locals only

Nothing generated yet

Answer the nine questions in Build a trip and this fills in.

The database

853 places, each tagged on all nine dimensions. The first 388 were fact-checked in September 2026; the 465 added in round two are queued for the same pass. Sort, filter, and check the work — this is the asset the whole product sits on.

PlaceCategoryNeighborhoodPop.PriceTrapWhy it's in here