Rappel - Reminders

Inspiration 💡

The idea for Rappel came from content creator Sam Beckman, who shared a simple frustration: creating reminders felt fragmented and unnecessarily tedious. Between calendars, reminder apps, and cold, empty forms, even small reminders felt like work. Rappel was born from the desire to remove that friction and make reminders feel effortless again.

What it does 🧐

Rappel is a cross-platform reminders app for people who just need reminders.

Instead of filling out forms, users create reminders by completing a guided sentence. This makes reminder creation fast, natural, and intuitive. Rappel focuses only on the essentials — recurring reminders, custom snoozing, reliable notifications, and true cross-device sync — without turning into a task manager.

How I built it 🔨

One guiding principle: simplicity above all else.

The guided sentence input became the foundation of the app and shaped every decision that followed. Recurring logic, notifications, syncing, and UI were all designed to stay out of the way. Features were added only when they clearly reduced friction, not when they added power for its own sake.

Challenges I ran into 😰

Keeping the app simple was the hardest challenge.

As a technical builder, the temptation to add more features is always there. The real work was knowing what not to build, resisting over-engineering and feature creep while protecting Rappel’s core promise: fast, effortless reminders.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of 🙌

Built a focused product that prioritizes simplicity over feature count
Shipped a unique sentence-based reminder creation flow
Delivered reliable cross-platform behavior without added complexity
Created a usable, polished app — not just a technical demo

What I learned 🧠

I learned that simplicity is a product decision, not a lack of features.

Stripping away options to reach Rappel’s “anti-NASA” core required more discipline than adding functionality. The best experiences often come from carefully removing, not adding.