Evenstar - The Personal Review Journal

With Evenstar, you write reviews for yourself instead of anonymous people on the internet. You can easily access your own reviews for when you're looking for something fun to do or a place to eat.

Comment

The Story

The idea for Evenstar is one that've carried for a long time.

It all started one day when I was out grocery shopping, when I noticed one of my favorite snack brands was on sale. You could buy 4 packs for the price of 2! I usually don't like to spend money on expensive snacks, but this sale was a great opportunity to try the other flavors I never had before. So I bought 4 different flavors to try.

The next couple of weeks I would be enjoying these snacks...

A few months later, when I was grocery shopping again, I was looking for some snacks and saw the same brand. I thought to myself: "I should take one of those". Then it turned out that I had totally forgotten which flavor I liked, and I knew there was one I didn't like!

I should have written this down somewhere, like a review of which flavors I liked, so I don't have to remember it.

This made me think about 'reviews' which then made me realize that we're always asked to write reviews for other people, like when you've ordered food, or when you've purchased a product. You write the review, never to be seen by you again. The other thing I realized was that reviews by others cannot always be trusted. They can be written by someone with a different taste, or it could be a fake review completely!

Evenstar is here to solve this.

What it does

With Evenstar you write reviews for yourself. By reviewing your experiences, food you've eaten, places you've visited, you build a complete database of things you like and don't like.

The next time you want to go eat somewhere, buy something or watch a movie, you can reference your previous reviews to make a more educated decision.

How the team was formed

Dave and I have known each other for years. In fact, we're old colleagues. We worked at this mobile app agency together. At some point we were put into the same development team and it just 'clicked' between us. We thought alike, which made working together super pleasant.

After I left that company in 2021, we stayed in touch and we've occasionally met up, just to have lunch or dinner, hang out, and talk about our work, tech and life.

One day Dave told me he thought of this app idea I told him about back when we were still colleagues, about how one of his colleagues asked him about places in Japan that he visited some time ago, and how he forgot which places he liked and didn't like.

And thus we both had use-cases for this app-idea, so we decided it would be a fun pet project for us to try and build together.

Challenges we ran into

Our biggest challenge was time. We both work full-time. I have a family with two kids that also deserve attention and Dave just started a new project at work which cost him a lot of energy.

Luckily I'm a pet-project addict, so I've actually got some experience in managing pet projects in small time-windows. This basically comes down to spending an hour or 2 in the evenings when the kids are in bed.

We've also met up a few times in the hackaton period to work on the app together, but most of the time we would work on it on our own.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Just the fact that we're able to deliver a MVP in less than 2 months with the limited amount of time and energy we had, I believe is something we can be proud off.

What we learned

The pressure of the deadline taught us to focus on the important things. We've stripped certain functionality for the first version just so we can deliver a functional app that still clearly demonstrates the app's intention.

This was also our first app ever that uses RevenueCat and we loved it so much. I have build subscriptions into apps in the past using the platform/native approaches and it always made me cry. With RevenueCat it truly was a breeze!

What's next for Evenstar - The Personal Review Journal

During our meetups, we've brainstormed a lot about what Evenstar should become. We'll first continue with adding some of the features which we had to strip in order to make the deadline, things like:

  • Category Management
  • Tag Management
  • Dark Theme
  • Prettier Icon
  • Prettier Theme

Then when the core is finished, we want to see if we can make the app smarter, by having it make suggestions for the user based on the reviews they've written.

Built With

Share this project:

Updates