Why we built siono

Group chats are great at making plans. They’re terrible at making decisions. siono is the smallest possible tool that fixes that — and the discipline behind keeping it small.

The granola-bar Tuesday

It started, as these things do, with a group chat.

Six people, a Tuesday night, the same loop we’d been running for months: “where are we eating?” → three suggestions → two thumbs-up → one “actually I can’t do Thai” → silence → someone gives up and picks the default sushi place we’d been to fourteen times. By the time anyone committed, half the group had lost interest and was eating a granola bar alone.

There are 4,000 apps that solve this. None of them get used. Every one of them asks you to download something, sign up, invite your friends to also sign up, and then — only then — vote on a restaurant. By that point it’s 9pm and you’ve eaten the granola bar.

We wanted the smallest possible tool that closes the loop. Not an event planner. Not a social network. Not a “decisions platform.” A link you paste in the group chat that lets people vote in two taps without creating an account, and a result everyone can see.

That’s siono.

What it is

A poll. Two to twelve options. Anyone with the link can vote. Results are live. There’s no login wall, no app, no email-collection pop-up before you can see the question. You make a duel in fifteen seconds and share it.

If that sounds like Doodle or StrawPoll or any of the other twelve things you’ve tried, here’s what’s different: siono is opinionated about what it won’t do.

• No accounts to vote. Sign-in is for poll creators who want to see who voted, not for participants. The friction-free vote is the whole point.
• No “premium tier” to unlock more options. A free poll has the same features as a paid one because there is no paid one.
• No ads. No interstitials, no popups, no “you’re 1 vote away from seeing the results — share to unlock.” That stuff exists to extract attention. We’re not in that business.
• No tracking pixels you didn’t agree to. We have analytics. We have an affiliate strip on World Cup pages. Both are disclosed inline, the affiliate strip is dismissible, and neither follows you around the internet.
• No bloat. The whole site loads in under a second on a 3G connection. We measure this. When it slips, we fix it.

Why now

We launched siono right as the FIFA World Cup 2026 cycle began, because sports is where group decisions actually matter. “Who’s going to win Group A?” is a poll. “Where are we watching the final?” is a poll. “Should we draft Mbappé first?” is a poll. The World Cup is 104 matches across three countries with 48 teams — every single one of those is a conversation that ends with a poll.

We built the WC layer of siono first because we wanted a hard test: real-time data, a global audience, a fixed timeline we couldn’t slip. If siono can survive the World Cup, it can survive your fantasy league.

The discipline

The studio has watched the same pattern play out a hundred times: a small tool gets popular because it’s small, then someone decides “wouldn’t it be great if it also did X,” and three years later it’s a bloated SaaS no one loved enough to keep using.

The discipline siono runs on is what can we remove, not what can we add. Every feature has to earn its weight. The “share my pick” OG card ships. The “cross-poll friend recommendations” engine doesn’t, ever.

What’s next

Through the World Cup, siono will keep getting better at being a World Cup tool: live standings, knockout brackets that resolve as results land, per-team schedule pages, a hotel-booking layer for fans traveling to matches. After the final whistle on July 19, we go back to being a general-purpose decision tool — but the bones we built for the WC (real-time data, share cards, low-friction voting) serve everything else too.

The underlying World Cup data layer is its own product: the Zafronix WC API. We needed the data ourselves; figured other people would too.

How to try it

Open siono.app, tap Create, write your question, paste the link in your group chat. That’s it. If you want ten more polls, make ten more polls. If you never come back, that’s fine too — we built siono to fade into the background of your group decisions, not to be the destination.

The granola-bar Tuesday is over. Make a poll.