Jules Kozak

I'm Jules — Dutch, Netherlands-based, and I've been to 50+ festivals across Europe over the past decade. Tomorrowland, Defqon.1, Awakenings, ADE, Mysteryland, DGTL, Loveland, Parookaville — I've done the big stages and the underground warehouses, the camping weekends and the one-day city festivals. Festival culture is where I've met most of my closest friends.

FestivalMates exists because I kept running into the same problem: my friend groups don't always overlap on genre. Some years I wanted to go to a techno festival and nobody in my circle was into techno. The existing apps — Radiate, Tinder Festival Mode — match by looks or location, not by what actually matters for festival compatibility: music taste. I decided to build the app I wanted. I'm building in public, documenting the process, and shipping features in evening and weekend sessions.

On the tech side, FestivalMates runs on Next.js 14 with TypeScript, Supabase for auth + database + storage, Spotify's Web API for real listening data, PostHog for analytics, Stripe for Pro subscriptions, and Vercel for deployment. Every compatibility score (the “Mate Score”) is calculated from your actual top artists and top genres — no self-reported interests, no guessing.