Soonish

I overshot the end-of-November deadline by nearly 24 hours, but nevertheless I have shipped the second product in my 12 products in 12 months challenge!

It’s called Soonish and it’s so bare-bones that it doesn’t have a landing page yet :)

What it is

You know those people you really want to stay in touch with, but for whatever reason life gets in the way and you only rarely see? If you’ve ever found yourself earnestly saying “we should catch up soon“, only to say the same thing a full year later when you bump into that person again, you’ll know what I’m talking about.

Soonish is a tool I made to solve this and make it easy to keep in regular, IRL contact with the people you care about the most.

It’s great for people with friends you care about but need to make an effort to actually see, or for anyone who wants to grow or strengthen your network.

It’s a web app and you can use it right now on desktop, mobile or anything in between, at app.sooni.sh.

How it came to be

Every now and then I catch a glimpse of someone on LinkedIn or Twitter that I used to hang out with regularly, but stopped seeing regularly for some reason (e.g. colleagues at a previous job, friends from university). It makes me sad that I don’t regularly keep in touch with them.

So I built Soonish to keep track of the important folks in my life, and send me reminders to organise a catch-up with them on a particular schedule (e.g. every 3 months).

The app also stores contact info and notes, along with notes from my previous and forthcoming catch-ups.

If that sounds like something that would be useful, please sign up (it’s free) at app.sooni.sh.

Lessons learned

I was pleased at how quickly I was able to throw this together, even though I overshot the deadline by a day or so. It was extremely helpful to be able to use some boilerplate projects I had previously put together, which made getting a Single Page App and associated API server up and running relatively painless.

I could have scoped the exact screens, forms etc. that were required a bit better, and found myself feeling my way a bit. But overall I feel like I kept the scope reasonably well-constrained (in large part thanks to the self-imposed deadline).

Tools used

Coming up next

Once again I have no idea what I will launch next month. December is brutally short because of the festive delights towards the end of the month, so it will have to be something pretty small in scope. Right now I’m considering a SaaS tool to help you automate GitHub backups for your GH organisation - so ping me an email if that sounds useful to you…