Inspiration
I'd heard about Snap Kit when it first launched, and kept seeing new, cool apps pop up that were using the platform. Apps like Yolo, Hoop, and Trash. At the same time, I think the Snap Kit SDK is really underused by most apps, so I thought there was a lot of room for something new and interesting.
When quarantine started and I found myself with a lot of extra time, I decided to brainstorm ideas for a Snap Kit app. Around that same time, story challenges started blowing up on social media. They were dumb but fun challenges, like posting your favorite song, drawing a carrot, or doing 10 pushups. I decided I could supercharge this trend by building a dedicated app for this type of content, with seamless sharing right to your story.
What it does
Swirl lets you share fun challenges to your stories and tag friends. It has dozens of original templates about memes, movies, music, art, games – there's no theme or limits to the types of content on there. Just find a template, share it to your Snap or Insta story, and tag friends to keep the challenge going!
How I built it
I didn't know a thing about iOS development before I built this, so I first took a few weeks to learn all I could about the app dev process. Once I felt competent, I started working on the app on my own. It took me a few months to build everything and knock out all the bugs. I mainly used swift, with firebase as a database.
Challenges I ran into
Development challenges: Fetching images, memory leaks, all of UIKit. (I wrote a blog post about my experience with the entire development process)
Marketing challenges: I had to rename my app right before launching due to a copyright issue, writing good marketing copy was surprisingly really hard. I'm still learning how to promote my app on social media.
Motivational challenges: Staying productive and motivated while working on my own schedule, not getting discouraged by hard bugs.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
I launched my first app! It’s now on the app store here. Going from knowing nothing to feeling pretty competent in app development in the span of a few months felt really great.
I launched it on Product Hunt and got featured, which was awesome to see! check it out
What I learned
Everything is hard: making software is hard, design is hard, creating a website is hard, marketing is hard, getting users is hard, asking friends for feedback is hard. There's no easy part of building a product. I knew it would be hard going in, but the reality of it is much heavier than I thought.
I also learned how to stay motivated. I doubted myself a lot, whether it was with programming, having the right idea, promotion. I learned when to step back for a bit to get out of a streak of negative thinking and try to ride the streaks of positivity and motivation as long as I could.
What's next for Swirl
Adding more interactivity! Right now, most of the content is static images, but I want to add more interactive and personalized features. I've already started doing that by adding bitmoji stickers. For other new features, think creating/submitting your own content, dynamic lenses, and favoriting templates in the app.
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