Yucatán Deals went live today.
It is a platform for finding and booking local experiences in Yucatán - restaurants, haciendas, cenotes, workshops, tours, the things worth making time for. I co-founded it. That is the one-line version, and it is accurate, but it skips the part that was actually interesting: the idea we started with is not the idea that shipped.
The problem was never supply
Yucatán is full of places worth knowing.
Some are easy to find. A restaurant people return to year after year. A hacienda with quiet gardens. A cenote that makes an afternoon of heat disappear. Others are easy to miss entirely - a family-run workshop, a small wellness space, a tour that shows you a version of the region you would not have found alone.
The gap was never a shortage of things to do. It was that discovery was bad. Finding these places meant asking someone who already knew, or scrolling through listings that told you a price and almost nothing else.
So the first version of the plan was simple: one place where residents and visitors could find local experiences, understand what they were booking, and buy them without friction.
That plan lasted until we started building it.
What "deals" actually means here
"Deals" suggests one thing. Discounts.
But the value in Yucatán is not that something costs less. It is the character of the place, the people running it, and whether the afternoon stays with you afterwards. A breakfast in a restored house. A food tour through streets you thought you already knew. A table somewhere you would have walked straight past.
A list of discounts does not carry any of that. If we built a page that sorted experiences by how much money you saved, we would have made the discovery problem worse - we would have taught people to compare on the one dimension that matters least.
So we kept the name and changed what it points at. There are real offers on the platform - the name is honest about the mechanism, and a good price is a genuine reason to finally book the thing you kept postponing. What we stopped doing was treating the discount as the reason to go. A deal here means a place worth your afternoon, offered on good terms. That is a higher bar than a percentage, and it is the one we design against.
The businesses asked better questions than we did
Nearly everything that changed came out of conversations.
When we started showing Yucatán Deals to local entrepreneurs, hotel managers, restaurateurs and tour operators, they did not ask about commission structures first. They asked how their business would be represented. What kind of audience it would bring. Whether their story would still be visible next to the offer.
Those were the right questions, and we did not have good answers to all of them yet.
The businesses that joined at that stage became our Founding Partners. They did more than fill in a profile - they told us, fairly directly, where the platform was treating them as inventory rather than as businesses. That feedback is the reason the profiles look the way they do now.
The clearest thing that came out of it: this could not feel like a crowded discount site. It had to feel like a guide from someone who actually knows the region.
Choosing the quieter version
That meant changing how the platform looked and how it spoke.
We wanted something warm and unhurried - closer to a recommendation from a well-travelled friend than a page trying to make the loudest promise. Photography carries most of it, because the places argue for themselves better than copy does. The colors came from limestone, natural paper, warm ink and the landscape. The words got shorter and more selective.
No countdown timers. No urgency theatre. No pressure to book something because it happens to be on the screen.
This is a harder version to build, and a slower one to convert. We took it anyway, because the alternative optimises for the first booking at the cost of every one after it.
The rebuild took time. Pages were rewritten, details reconsidered, and a fair number of earlier ideas thrown out.
The work behind something that feels simple
The platforms that feel effortless are the ones that absorbed the complexity somewhere the user never sees.
Every part of this needed a decision. How businesses present an experience. How someone buys it. How a voucher gets redeemed by a host who is busy and does not want to learn a new system. How all of it stays clear in both English and Spanish, which is not translation so much as writing it twice.
Plenty of those decisions were wrong the first time. That is the normal cost of building something, and the only real mistake is being slow to admit which ones they were.
What the process taught me, more than anything technical: a clear identity does not get decided in a meeting. It develops through listening, testing, and being willing to change direction when something still does not feel right - including after you have already built it.
It is not only for visitors
Yucatán Deals gets described as a travel platform. It is that, but it is not only that.
A lot of the best places here are unknown to people who live twenty minutes away. Routine does the damage: you go back to the same three restaurants, postpone the day trip, and save the interesting thing for "another weekend" that keeps not arriving.
So it is also built for couples planning a different evening, families who want an easy weekend, people new to Mérida still working out what is here, and locals curious about what has opened outside their usual few streets.
The point is to connect those people with independent businesses and local creators, with enough context that the choice means something.
A beginning, not a finished story
Launching is a real moment, but it is not the end of anything.
The platform grows through the places we find, the businesses we meet, and the experiences people decide are worth sharing. Our Founding Partners joined while it was still visibly unfinished, and their involvement shaped what it stands for: local character, thoughtful discovery, and experiences chosen with care.
There is always more of Yucatán to find. More hidden courtyards, family businesses, coastal escapes, quiet haciendas, unexpected afternoons.
The goal is not to show you everything. It is to help you find what is worth knowing.
Yucatán Deals is live now. It is a venture I co-founded, not a client project.