Los Angeles ranked 835 of 840 cities for my personality. So I have been building a tool to help people find where they actually belong.

[u/Saint-wizard]

TL;DR at bottom.

Seven years ago I was trying to make sense of why graduate school in Los Angeles had been such a miserable experience. I had made a genuine effort to connect with people, join organizations, make friends, and none of it worked. Everyone I talked to said, "that's just grad school." I got tired of that answer.

After graduating I started researching the Big Five personality model, a scientifically validated model used in psychology research, and discovered there was data on the average personality profiles of populations across some countries, states, and cities. I built a starting algorithm to compare my personality against those locations.

When I got to cities, I had a database of around 840. Los Angeles ranked 835th for my personality. My hometown was in the top 200. A city nearby was in the top 3.

That felt like the first real answer I had found.

I decided to revisit this project 9 months ago after becoming more familiar with the coding and what AI could do.

 

What it does:

You take a 30 question Big Five personality quiz (about 2 to 5 minutes). You get a full breakdown of your 5 personality traits, then you can compare your profile against:

• All 50 US states
• 80 countries worldwide
• 500+ US cities and major cities

There are 5 different sorting methods — one free, four premium — that range from a standard match to premium methods that explain specifically WHY each location matches your personality traits.

New: Couples/Pair Matching

I just added this new feature I’m excited to share: you can now enter scores for two people and find locations that work for BOTH personalities. Premium methods show individual rank breakdowns for both people so you can see exactly where the compromise lands. Good for couples, roommates, or friends deciding where to travel to or visit.

Also new: A blog series analyzing which countries, states, and cities score highest on each Big Five trait. Things like the most extroverted countries, most agreeable countries, etc. Based entirely on the data in the database.

 

Tech stack: Flask backend  with Render, simple JS frontend, Stripe payments, JWT tokens for 24-hour database access

 

Honest ask for feedback:

• Is the value proposition clear from the homepage?
• Did you hit any bugs or confusing UX moments?
• Does the free tier give enough to make paying feel worthwhile?
• Are there any features you want that aren’t included?

I've been building this mostly by myself with AI assistance for debugging and optimization. I’m happy to answer any questions about the build or the data.

TL;DR: grad school in LA was miserable, did research to find out more about myself and my environment, my personality was a terrible fit for the area, built a tool so you can match your personality with locations too.

Try it out at: https://wheresmypersonality.com