On New Year’s Eve 2023, Taylor Davis moved out of her New York City apartment and headed home to Statesville, N.C. Two months earlier, she had walked away from a career in investment banking to build Troodie, an app that would help users discover restaurants favored by friends and family.
Troodie officially launched on the Apple App Store in September 2025 and now has more than 1,000 downloads, concentrated heavily in Charlotte with pockets in New York, Atlanta and Chicago. Davis’s goal is 5,000 by the end of 2026.
The problem she’s solving
The idea was born during the pandemic, when Davis was in graduate school at Cornell. During the lockdown, she found herself scrolling TikTok and saving restaurants in cities she couldn’t visit. When it was finally safe to explore, she kept having trouble finding those bookmarked posts. More than that, she was relying on restaurant reviews from strangers. She wanted her friends’ opinions.
“On Troodie, if I log in and I see my friend has gone to a restaurant in their hometown and said they enjoyed it, I know they’re talking to their friends,” she said. “It’s not performative.”
Taylor Davis and family at the Troodie launch party.Courtesy of Taylor Davis
Davis’s vision is to build Troodie into a one-stop destination where users can get recommendations as they’re traveling — open the app and see where friends have eaten, what hotels they stayed at, and bars they’ve liked.
How the app works
When users first open Troodie, they take an eight-question quiz about their dining habits. “Do you prefer solo dining or big group dinners?” “What’s your ideal Friday night?” The app then assigns each user a “Troodie persona.”
“Mine is Social Explorer,” Davis said, explaining that she views dining as a form of connection — a social experience.
The quiz is a window into the “full social dining ecosystem,” Davis said she is creating.
From there, users can save spots, follow friends’ dining activity and get location-based notifications when they’re near a restaurant they’ve bookmarked.
The business model
Troodie doesn’t charge diners for a membership, and Davis hopes to keep it that way. She also wants to keep her app free of advertising.
Troodie makes money through a creator marketplace, where restaurants pay a monthly fee to connect with content creators who promote them on social media. Unlike traditional influencer deals, Troodie tracks how much revenue each social post drives and handles payments directly through the app. Davis views this data as helping restaurants “make smarter marketing decisions.”
Dining and Cooking