I Hate Shopping. So I’m Building Something That Does It For Me.
I have a closet full of clothes I don’t wear, a phone full of apps I don’t use, and exactly zero interest in spending my Saturday afternoon browsing a mall.
I know what I like when I see it. I just never want to go looking for it.
That’s a problem that apparently affects most men and a surprising number of women who would rather do almost anything else than think about what to wear. We’re not lazy. We’re just busy. And the existing solutions are terrible.
You can spend an hour scrolling ASOS, drowning in 10,000 options with no filter that actually matters. You can hire a personal stylist for $300 an hour. You can do what most people do, which is buy the same three things on repeat until someone tells you to branch out.
None of those work. So I’m building something that does.
Introducing Fabio
Fabio is a personal shopping app built around one idea: you shouldn’t have to think about this, you should just be able to choose what you want to look like.
Here’s how it works.
You open the app. You set your budget, your size, and a rough sense of your style. Takes about 90 seconds. Then Fabio shows you complete outfits. Not individual items. Full looks - jacket, jeans, shoes - pulled from real retailers like ASOS, Zara, H&M, Nordstrom, Banana Republic.
You swipe right if you like it. Left if you don’t. Swipe up if you want to buy it. That’s it.
Every swipe trains Fabio’s taste model. After a few sessions it knows you better than you know yourself. The outfits get sharper. The misses get rarer.
When you find something you want, you swipe up. Fabio opens the checkout at each retailer with your size already selected. You buy. Done.
No browsing. No tabs. No decisions.
Why this doesn’t exist yet
The technology to build this has existed for years. The reason nobody has done it well comes down to one hard problem: checkout.
Buying a complete outfit means buying from three or four different stores. Each store has its own cart, its own checkout flow, its own account system. Getting those to talk to each other seamlessly is genuinely difficult — which is why every app in this space either solves the curation problem or the checkout problem, but not both.
Fabio’s V1 solves curation first. The checkout experience launches you directly to each retailer’s product page with your size pre-selected — one tap per store. Not perfect. Good enough to be dramatically better than anything else out there.
The seamless one-tap checkout across all stores is coming. But shipping something real beats waiting for something perfect.
What I’m building and how
I’m documenting the full build here — the technical decisions, the dead ends, the economics, and the product thinking behind every choice.
A few things worth knowing upfront:
This is an affiliate model. When you buy something through Fabio, retailers pay a small commission — typically 5 to 12 percent. You pay the same price you’d pay going directly to the store. Fabio makes money by sending retailers customers who actually buy things. Clean, aligned incentives.
The AI is the product. The outfit assembly engine is what makes Fabio different from a search engine with a prettier interface. It’s not just filtering by price and size — it’s understanding what goes together aesthetically, and learning your specific taste over time from the way you swipe.
The target demo is people who don’t want an app. That’s the counterintuitive part. Fabio is designed to be used as little as possible. Fifteen minutes every few months, a few new looks in your wardrobe, back to your life. If you’re spending hours on it, something is wrong.
Follow along
This Substack is where I’ll document the build — the wins, the walls, and the honest economics of building a consumer app in 2026.
If you’re someone who hates shopping, I want to hear from you. Reply to this post, or reach out directly. The early feedback will shape what Fabio becomes.
If you’re someone who thinks this already exists and I’m wasting my time, I especially want to hear from you. Tell me what I’m missing.
Either way — welcome to Fabio.
First post. More soon.
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