Improve It — Instagram
September 2026
In a city that never sleeps, we still had no idea what was happening around us
Living in a place that never stops — a million things going on every night — yet we couldn't find any of them without leaving the app everything was already happening on.
Where this started
The night that made me build this
Visiting friends in New York. Saturday night, we wanted to go out. We knew stuff was happening somewhere — there always is — but knowing that and actually finding it are two different things.
So I Googled "things to do in NYC tonight." Got listicles from 2019 and a wall of sponsored links. Nothing actually happening right now. Found a bar, checked its Instagram, tapped through old highlights — nothing recent. We gave up and just walked around.
The answer was in my hand the whole time. Venues around us were posting stories. DJs were live. People were checking in. Instagram had all of it — it just had nowhere to show me.
The numbers
The data is clear
The solution
Pulse — one bubble in the stories tray
It sits right after "Your Story." A different shape from the round story rings — an elliptical rotating ring — so your eye catches it instantly. Tap it, see what's happening near you right now. Nobody has to do anything new.
Tap the categories, swipe through venues, open the Pulse bubble
Inside the bubble
Stories from your city
The obvious rebuttal
Why Maps is not the answer
Instagram shipped a Map in 2025. But watch how far you dig to reach it — and what happens when you finally get there.
Three taps to reach it — and when you do, the businesses aren't even clickable. The Map shows a Guggenheim pin, a Jazz at Lincoln Center pin, but tapping them opens nothing. No page, no story, no hours. The discovery loop dead-ends right where it should pay off.
The core bet
Placement is key
The stories tray is the highest-traffic strip in the app. Burying discovery three taps deep guarantees nobody finds it. Here's roughly how daily reach stacks up.
Directional estimates from public IG usage data. The point is the order of magnitude between the stories tray and a menu buried in the DMs.
Under the hood
How Pulse decides what to show you
It ranks nearby stories by these signals — strongest first. The top one is something no other surface on Instagram can measure.
Stress-testing it
Edge cases
Trust layer
Pulse Verification
Why Meta ships it
Two tiers, one new ad product
Organic Pulse
Any verified business that posts a story shows up for nearby users. Zero cost, zero new effort. The post they'd make anyway now reaches people who don't follow them.
Pulse Promoted
Widen the radius, rank higher at peak hours, target by category. Hyper-local ads that land because the user is already in discovery mode. Snap proved it with Promoted Places at 400M MAU.
One bubble. Zero friction.
The venues are already posting. The people are already scrolling. Pulse just connects the two in the one place everybody already looks.
A concept. Not affiliated with Meta or Instagram.