# Águila

**We built it. We launched it. We learned. We shut it down.**

Águila was a platform where students found restaurant promotions near school. It reached ten paying restaurants in a few months. When the team decided to close it, we refunded every one of them — none of them asked us to. It is the shortest project on this site and the one I learned most from.

- Role: Code. Co-founder with one person on sales and one on design.
- Period: 2025
- Status: Closed
- Work: Product, Marketplace, Business, Team
- Source: https://github.com/eitan-que/Aguila

> Built. Launched. Learned. Shut down.

## The problem

A few hundred students leave the same building at the same time every day and
eat within ten blocks of it. The restaurants in those ten blocks want them.
Neither side has any way of finding the other, so the whole thing runs on word
of mouth and whoever happens to have a sign out.

## Where the idea came from

Not from me. **Gabriel Slotnisky** had been running a version of it alone
since the start of the year, called **MorfaloYa**, and it was not moving. We
had met at a talk, and he wrote to ask whether I wanted to do it properly.

So we split it the obvious way: I wrote the code, he sold, and **Nicolás
Krymkiewicz** came in for the design and the promotion banners. It stopped
being an idea and started being a thing within a few weeks, which is mostly a
fact about Gabriel selling.

## What it was

A Next.js app with two halves that shared a database:

- **The public side** — a directory of venues near school, each with its
  current promotions, at `/r/[restaurant]`. Internationalised from the start
  through a `[lang]` segment, because Águila was meant to work past one
  school.
- **The dashboard** — where a restaurant managed itself: its own page, its
  categories, its discounts. Auth with an email sign-in and callback flow, so
  an owner could log in and change a promotion without going through us.

That last part was the whole product thesis. A directory somebody else has to
update is a spreadsheet with extra steps; the thing worth building was the
venue changing its own offer at four in the afternoon because lunch went
badly.

## What happened

We reached **ten restaurants paying us**, several with promotions exclusive to
the platform. It worked. It was small, and it worked.

Then Gabriel said he would rather put himself one hundred percent into
studying for his university entrance exam. He offered to hand it to Nicolás
and me to carry on. The three of us talked it through and agreed together to
leave it there.

**We refunded every restaurant.** None of them asked. Several had months left
on what they had paid for and would have let it go.

Then we opened the source. If we were not going to run it, the work may as
well be readable.

## Why that is on my portfolio

Because the alternative was keeping money for a service we had stopped
providing, from ten small businesses, on the grounds that the contract did not
say we had to give it back.

It cost us the only revenue any of us had ever made. I would do it again
without thinking about it, and I would rather be the kind of person who finds
that obvious than the kind who has to decide.

## What I would do differently

Agree what happens when someone leaves, before selling the first month.

We never had that conversation, so when it arrived it had no framework, and
the path of least resistance was to stop. It is possible Águila should have
closed anyway — I am not sure it was a business rather than a good favour to
ten restaurants. But we did not decide that; we defaulted into it.

That gap is exactly what the founders agreement at [Restoman](/work/restoman)
exists to close, and I would not have known to write one if this had gone
well.

## Note

`aguila.lat` expired in September 2026 and was not renewed, so there is
nothing left to link to. The code is open source and still up.

The one picture of Águila that survives is the mockup on the work index, and it
survives because it was made to be shared rather than to be kept. I did not take
screenshots while it was running, so the dashboard, the rest of the venue pages
and most of the banners Nicolás made went with the domain. If you build
something that might not last, photograph it while it works.

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Page: https://eitanf.com/work/aguila · Español: https://eitanf.com/es/work/aguila.md · llms.txt: https://eitanf.com/llms.txt