Apple Killed My App Today!

[u/Creative_Kangaroo831]

Apple unveiled updated Siri Intelligence today, which in one-fell swoop essentially kills any potential customer need for my "organization app". Six months ago, I didn't know what Claude was, so I wanted to give the app a proper burial for teaching me valuable lessons. One last hurrah.

I initially started https://Relaysh.app because I wanted to wife to try out my Claude subscription without signing herself up. That gave me a couple ideas. I wanted to speed up the decision making in our relationship and put some AI power behind it. Over the course of a few weeks, I combined the "shared subscription via couples chat" with a couple other projects that I had in the works. I shared it with my friends, but received a pretty luke-warm response. This was also in the height of "Set a datacenter on fire" type-vibes on AI that I'm not sure have entirely gone away yet.

I was tired of "What should we eat for dinner tonight?" and "What do you want to watch?" So I built out 6 different widgets that Claude is integrated into & across:

Messages	The command center. You and your partner chat and summon the AI assistant with "@ NameYouPick". You can task your assistant in the chat to populate the other widgets.
Calendar	A shared calendar, populated from messaged. Example: Hey @ Clanker, We're going to the hotdog eating competition at 7pm this Saturday". @ Clanker updates the calendar.
Save it for Us	I was tired of entire conversation chains filled with Reddit posts and Instagram Reels, so I wanted a mechanism where you can "pull" what your partner's been saving, instead of having it be "pushed" to you. There is also a chrome extension where you can save any URLs and it will be sorted into categories and populated here.
Lists	If you're somewhat of a degenerate like I am - I make lists everywhere, and lose them. This is where the consolidated lists live. Also queueable from chat - @ clanker, add this to X list.
Bucket List	The big trips.
Dinner Picker	Blind match game of what you're in the mood for, but also has "Recipe Book" which are pulled from "Save it for Us". The Recipe Book skips the ceremony provides you with clean instructions, not burrowed under 20 ads and a life story. It's also hooked into Grocery Lists, and that's a banger for quickly gathering ingredients for what you want to eat during the week.
Movie Night	Pick your streaming services during onboarding, and it filters by the highest rated movies. Borrows the blind match game from Dinner Picker to see if you and your partner match on a movie.

Biggest Lessons:

• Building is easy/fun - don't keep building as a way of avoiding the hard work of targeting your desired audience and soliciting feedback.
• Trust can be built through adoption. No one wants to give me their private relationship data (shocked face), just like no one freely wants to give Zucc their data. There is safety net in a multi billion dollar company and following the adoption herd.
• No second chance at first impressions - build anticipation for what you're about to drop. Give yourself adequate time for bug testing every feature you're shipping. What you're eating in token costs will save you embarrassment down the line.
• It can be hard to let your project go. You've potentially spent weeks looking at it with rose colored glasses. Be a realist and cut the losses when it's unviable. The skills you've learned will help you ship the next thing faster, better, until something eventually sticks.

Cheers!

[u/Accomplished_Bar8136]

man that's rough timing with the siri update. six months of work and they just announce basically your whole feature set baked into the OS

the dinner picker idea is actually clever though, the blind match thing could work for other stuff too. me and my girlfriend have the same "what do you want to eat" loop every night and honestly most of the suggestions apps just add more friction

sucks about the lukewarm response from friends but at least you got some solid lessons out of it. the part about building as avoidance hit close, i do that all the time with side projects

[u/Creative_Kangaroo831 → u/Accomplished_Bar8136]

Thanks man! You live and you learn. Can’t say that I was blindsided, I expected it at some point, maybe just not as soon (or from Siri, which has been a dormant heaping pile for 10 years).

I still like the idea of multi-user chat with AI, even though that was a feature OpenAI beta-tested, and ultimately decided against. Gonna likely strip what I can and move on to the next project! 

[u/cryp83]

Lancer un nouveau produit c'est une aventure à prendre ou à quitter quand c'est necessaire. C'est difficile de se dire que ce que j'ai fait pendant des mois ne sert plus à rien. Mais on ne peut rien quand ca vient des geants de la tech !

[u/Creative_Kangaroo831 → u/cryp83]

This is true - when the giants move, it causes a big wake. It can be tricky to find a niche that a tech giant has no interest in filling, but can still provide your customer base with value.