I did not start favURL because I wanted to build a website tool. I started it, alone, because I believed something small businesses were sitting on, their own customers’ words, deserved to be seen. That belief is still true. The company is not.
On October 15th, favURL will shut down.
Why I started
The why never changed, even as almost everything else did. A friend had a restaurant with two hundred Google reviews and no way to show them to anyone. His customers had already written the best marketing copy he would ever get, paragraph by paragraph and it was locked inside a platform nobody scrolls through. I believed that was wrong. Not a business opportunity first, a wrong I wanted to fix first. The opportunity came after.
I believed that if you already earned the trust, in real reviews, from real people, you should not have to pay a designer or learn a website builder to show it. That belief carried me through building the product, through two pivots and through every late night since, as the sole founder with no one else on the cap table.
What it cost me to learn that
I built and rebuilt this twice. The first version was closer to a simple page generator: point it at a business, get a page. It worked, but it did not hold anyone’s attention past the first look, because a page with no ownership, no editing and no reason to come back is a demo, not a product.
The second pivot was about depth over reach: fewer assumptions, more actual control handed to the business owner. Editing. Claiming. A dashboard. Billing. The parts that make something a tool people keep, not a novelty they screenshot once. That pivot is the version that grew into what favURL became: pages spanning 143 categories across 35 cities, with real people who claimed their pages and edited them by hand.
I learned a lot in that process. I learned that being right about the why, reviews deserve better than a map pin, does not automatically make the how sustainable. I learned that building fast with AI can get a product further in five weeks than I expected and that the distance between “works” and “lasts” is still measured in years, not weeks. I learned more from watching real business owners use pages I built for them than from any plan I wrote beforehand.
What I built, honestly
Not to dwell on it, but so it is on the record: 622 generated pages, spanning 143 categories across 35 cities, used by real business owners who claimed them, edited them and put them in their Instagram bios and on their counters as QR codes. People trusted me with their reviews and their branding. That trust is the part I take most seriously in closing this down properly.
Why I am stopping
This is not my first startup and it will not be my last. My last one had a real exit and I came into favURL already knowing what building and shipping looks like. What I did not expect was how much fun this specific project would turn out to be or how much it would reignite the part of me that likes building things from nothing. Six months in, I can say plainly that it worked: I learned a lot, faster than I expected and I want to keep building.
What favURL is not, though, is the thing I am ready to go all in on. I built it alone and it stayed alone. No co-founder showed up who felt as invested in this specific idea as I was and I was not looking to force one into it just to keep the lights on. Without that, the ongoing cost, the time it takes to run something like this properly, the server bills, the API fees for every review read and every page generated, stops being a cost I am willing to keep paying indefinitely for a project I am not prepared to commit my life’s work to.
So I am closing it while I can close it well, rather than letting it become an obligation I resent. The six months already paid for themselves in what I learned. That is the outcome I am choosing to accept.
What happens next
I am not disappearing overnight. Here is exactly what to expect:
- Service ends October 15th, 2026. Until then, everything keeps working as normal, pages stay live, editing stays on, support stays on.
- Full refunds for everyone who paid. If you are on Basic, Pro or Agency, you will be refunded in full, no exceptions and nothing to ask twice for. I will reach out directly with the details.
- You can export your page. If you want to keep what favURL generated from your reviews, you will have the option to export your landing page before the shutdown. It was built from your reviews; you should be able to walk away with it.
If you have a page on favURL and have not heard from me directly by the time you read this, reach out through the contact page and I will make sure you are taken care of before October 15th.
Thank you
To everyone who searched their business, generated a page, claimed it, edited it or paid for a plan: thank you for trusting one person and an idea that started with a friend’s Google reviews. I believed reviews deserved better than being invisible. I still do. This chapter of trying to fix that is closing, but the belief behind it was never the part I got wrong.
Valon Badivuku, founder
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