I built Poppy as a side project to help people keep in touch more intentionally. Would love feedback on onboarding, reminders, and overall UX. Happy to answer questions.
Website looks nice. The copy being so painfully AI-written is a turnoff, enough that my first thought was "oh yeah, I remember hearing about this kind of app, I should look at the other one I'm thinking of". I do like that it's local and free.
Imported some contacts, doing quick setup, first contact, can't scroll down to confirm/finish setting them up. I'm on the SE, which is a slightly smaller screen, sometimes apps seem to have trouble with it, I assume they're assuming a larger screen.
The whole website was prompted. You can tell by the overload of emoji's on the page and every section having cards with hover effects. It's classic LLM design.
AI tends to be a buzz kill on products because it sends the signal "i can't be bothered to craft this deliberately."
So why then should we bother to interact with the product deliberately.
Around here most know how hard and time consuming it is to ship a production grade experience. AI helps a ton. it's not "wrong" per say, but it undeniably leaves an odor.
There's way way way more human slop complaining about AI than there is AI in the first place.
It would be so much nicer if people didn't feel compelled to add the 32nd iteration of whining about the methodology used to produce the content.
I'd say I can't wait until the fad passes, but it's always something, isn't it?
I guess because anger/irritation/outrage are such popular sentiments people tend to resort to that kind of content because it makes them feel good to participate in trends. There's always going to be the group of people who seek popularity by aping whatever the latest fad is.
Writing copy is painfully time consuming. AI just does it better, it's meant to communicate and people are not always great communicators. I know it'll write better copy than me.
Terminally online people need to get over this weird aversion to anything generated w/ help of AI. Do you have similar misgivings, like "this guy obviously used auto correct", or "he's using speech to text, I'm not reading anything unless its hand-written"
Get over it. It's here, it's useful, judge the product on its merits. I get if you see spam email messages that are overly tailored and ignoring them because the person obv didn't do the work. But this dude created a free app that looks pretty cool, maybe he didn't want to spend another few hours to create a pretty standard boilerplate website with app information.
Copy can signal that a real person spent time on the details and cared about the product. Auto-correct and speech-to-text still carry that idea.
Even boring corporate PR language communicates something. It says the company wants to project stability and predictability, which can be reassuring. Slightly awkward, unpolished copy also sends a signal. It suggests a person speaking directly off-the-cuff rather than polished corporate messaging, which some people prefer.
LLM-generated copy sends a signal too, and not always a good one. To me, it often suggests the author didn’t care enough to think carefully about the message - not even enough to edit something that came out of an LLM.
At that point it starts to feel like someone just prompted Claude to build a reminders app with no care or thought put into it, which I could do myself if I find this idea valuable at all and even personalize the hell out of it. Maybe that's an unfair first impression! But it's not a crazy one given how quickly the cost of code is approaching 0.
I literally do not understand this sentiment. Do you not enjoy anything that takes time to do? Do you not enjoy putting time in for things that other people will look at?
> I know it'll write better copy than me
If this is the case I am desperately pleading with you to please read and write more. If you think the copy on this page is passable, let alone good, please read more.
THere's a level of AI generated copy that makes the website look unpolished. I think it's right to critique, in the same way i'd critique an obvious bootstrap css website.
There's loads of factors that may implicitly turn someone off using an app, and I think it's important to let the OP know a critical one.
A lot of apps try to solve the “stay in touch with people” problem, but in my experience the novelty usually wears off after a while and the reminders start feeling like noise. Curious how you approached this in Poppy — did you design anything specifically to avoid reminder fatigue and make it sustainable long-term?
This is definitely a valid concern. Since I mostly built the app for myself I wanted to have 2 easy features.
1. The ability to snooze someone who I don’t feel like reaching out for a certain period of time
2. Having an easy mute global notifications option in the app and configurable per person
I was also considering the idea of grouping contacts to maybe say “hey out of these people you should reach out to someone next month”. Basically to keep you social/ in touch with someone.
I’m very open to feedback if you think folks might get tired of those too?
I really appreciate this work. Yes, it's AI language and it seems it's not polished to run on every device -yet.
And it does one thing really good: be there. Sounds silly, I know, but an app that tries to make the world better AT NO COST is so much more than "well, I could vibe code that myself".
Thanks fellow creator of this app. Thanks for believing that this app may have an impact on the important part of our life:
re/connecting people.
"Poppy turns your contacts into a living garden. Gentle reminders, zero guilt."—bleh, at least write your own taglines :/
This is a neat idea that has been tried about 300 times over, but since it's contingent on already being cognizant of keeping up with relationships, people that install it aren't going to people that need to be using it.
> This is a neat idea that has been tried about 300 times over
Could you share the top 3 attempts that tried it and are better at it? I only know that things like this should exist, but didn't look any further into this class of things, yet.
My idea of what to look into is some kind of CRM for my personal contacts.
Not sure if it's top 3, but I use Monica https://www.monicahq.com/ which does advertise itself as a personal CRM. I certainly underutilize its features but things like birthday reminders + a place for a few notes (where do they live again? who's their partner?) is nice
I mean, I’m a pretty ADHD guy, very in the moment, and although I sporadically invite friends or old colleagues to catch up for lunch, I mean to do it regularly, but I might forget to invite them for years at a time, so this might be good for me. I could really used an “Anki for lunch”, spaced repetition reminders for people in my Rolodex, as it were.
Makes me think about a neat feature possibility -- a constraint that means having a garden means others can see into it in some sense, just like a real life garden in your yard. A garden demonstrates to others your care and attention toward it
Very interesting idea! One of the features of the app is the no signup no data associated to you which has to change if I want to allow peeking into your friends garden to see “anonymous views” of their garden.
Firstly I just want to say thank you to all of you who took the time to comment/ download / review the app/ send me feedback. Positive or negative feedback this was pretty cool to receive.
This is the first app I built and it’s cool to see something which I initially built for myself resonates with other folks here!!
A few quick responses:
On the AI copy:
Fair criticism. I did use LLMs to help structure some of the landing page text. Writing marketing copy is honestly not my strongest skill and I spent most of my time building the app itself. That said, the comments here made it clear the tone feels generic, which is the opposite of what the app is trying to do. I’ll probably rewrite a lot of it in a simpler, more direct voice.
On reminder fatigue:
This was one of the main things I worried about when building it. A lot of apps in this space turn into “nagware.” My approach was:
- You only add a small subset of contacts (not your whole address book).
- you adjust the frequency to what feels comfortable and start muting or snoozing people as they either leave your circle in life, or you feel like it’s becoming annoying. Of course I’m open to feedback here!
On privacy:
Everything lives locally on the device. No accounts, no backend. The app literally has no way for me to see your data. For something this personal, that felt like the only acceptable design.
Again I built it mostly because I personally struggle with the “out of sight, out of mind” problem with friends who don’t live nearby anymore. If it ends up useful to others, that’s a bonus, I’ve already gotten 500 downloads in my first day which is so cool because I had a target of 100, now my next target is 1000 (post bug fixes this weekend haha)
Really appreciate the bug reports and feature suggestions in this thread keep’em coming.
This is great, but also not well suited (in terms of visuals, name, language) to some of the audiences that need it most. A version that resonates more with middle aged men would be great. Oak or something.
This is a bit off-topic and not a direct response to your very reasonable suggestion, but I always find it weird and uncomfortable when companies go over-the-top on the gender stereotypes -- even as someone whose interests admittedly overlap with those very stereotypes.
For example, barber shops that serve bourbon. I'm a fan of bourbon, but it almost feels like they're calling me out for being "basic!" Or I feel like I'm being targeted like those Axe body spray commercials thought they were targeting me when I was a kid in the 90s.
Anyway, I'm not anti-oak, or having it be a farm or something. But also, flowers can be nice.
The AI writing is a big turn-off: if the app is crafted with the same care as the copy on the website, I'm not sure I want to trust the owner with VERY personal data like that :)
If get a chance to read the website / privacy policy you’ll find that I actually don’t have access to any data, you don’t need to sign up to begin using the app. The sales pitch is entirely privacy first :)
Thanks so much for this! It’s exactly the kind of think I’ve looked for many times. There are slick alternatives that I abandoned due to their (to me) insane pricing models, like “add a few friends for free, then unlock unlimited friends for only $20/mo!” I get that they want to make money, but I’m not paying hundreds per year to remember to call my sister.
The main competitor here is plain old Reminders, or OmniFocus, or any other task manager. A repeating reminder to text that cool coworker you want to stay in touch with isn’t as shiny, but it gets the job done.
I don’t know if there’s an Apple API for getting metadata about recent calls and texts, but that would be the final piece for me: if I texted Joe yesterday, reset the timer on his reminder. I wouldn’t touch that idea with a ten foot pole for other apps, but your privacy policy of “everything you do stays on your own device and we see none of it” is perfect and compatible with the feature.
thank you for taking the time to comment, definitely got me hyped haha. I’m so happy you see the value I find in the app. That’s definitely an interesting idea. I initially wanted to avoid the app from accessing any external data (tbd if that’s even possible) for the MVP, but as the app grows I’ll see if the check-ins are a pain point for people.
Readit News
Imported some contacts, doing quick setup, first contact, can't scroll down to confirm/finish setting them up. I'm on the SE, which is a slightly smaller screen, sometimes apps seem to have trouble with it, I assume they're assuming a larger screen.
I’ll be working on fixing this :). Unfortunately I didn’t bother tested with the SE, only the 11 onwards, lesson learned.
"No feed, no doomscrolling — just intention."
"Not your whole address book — just the ones you'd hate to lose touch with"
"You care deeply—you're just terrible at follow-through."
"You care deeply—your ADHD brain just doesn't..."
So why then should we bother to interact with the product deliberately.
Around here most know how hard and time consuming it is to ship a production grade experience. AI helps a ton. it's not "wrong" per say, but it undeniably leaves an odor.
Deleted Comment
I'm just counting down the days until no one can actually tell how much AI was involved so we can get to discussing whether the thing is good or not.
It would be so much nicer if people didn't feel compelled to add the 32nd iteration of whining about the methodology used to produce the content.
I'd say I can't wait until the fad passes, but it's always something, isn't it?
I guess because anger/irritation/outrage are such popular sentiments people tend to resort to that kind of content because it makes them feel good to participate in trends. There's always going to be the group of people who seek popularity by aping whatever the latest fad is.
Terminally online people need to get over this weird aversion to anything generated w/ help of AI. Do you have similar misgivings, like "this guy obviously used auto correct", or "he's using speech to text, I'm not reading anything unless its hand-written"
Get over it. It's here, it's useful, judge the product on its merits. I get if you see spam email messages that are overly tailored and ignoring them because the person obv didn't do the work. But this dude created a free app that looks pretty cool, maybe he didn't want to spend another few hours to create a pretty standard boilerplate website with app information.
Copy can signal that a real person spent time on the details and cared about the product. Auto-correct and speech-to-text still carry that idea.
Even boring corporate PR language communicates something. It says the company wants to project stability and predictability, which can be reassuring. Slightly awkward, unpolished copy also sends a signal. It suggests a person speaking directly off-the-cuff rather than polished corporate messaging, which some people prefer.
LLM-generated copy sends a signal too, and not always a good one. To me, it often suggests the author didn’t care enough to think carefully about the message - not even enough to edit something that came out of an LLM.
At that point it starts to feel like someone just prompted Claude to build a reminders app with no care or thought put into it, which I could do myself if I find this idea valuable at all and even personalize the hell out of it. Maybe that's an unfair first impression! But it's not a crazy one given how quickly the cost of code is approaching 0.
I literally do not understand this sentiment. Do you not enjoy anything that takes time to do? Do you not enjoy putting time in for things that other people will look at?
> I know it'll write better copy than me
If this is the case I am desperately pleading with you to please read and write more. If you think the copy on this page is passable, let alone good, please read more.
Sorry, no. It doesn’t do it better. It’s like chewing cardboard. All fluff, not a lot of actual well-presented information.
AI is also not a great communicator- it learned from people, which you said are not great.
There's loads of factors that may implicitly turn someone off using an app, and I think it's important to let the OP know a critical one.
1. The ability to snooze someone who I don’t feel like reaching out for a certain period of time 2. Having an easy mute global notifications option in the app and configurable per person
I was also considering the idea of grouping contacts to maybe say “hey out of these people you should reach out to someone next month”. Basically to keep you social/ in touch with someone.
I’m very open to feedback if you think folks might get tired of those too?
And it does one thing really good: be there. Sounds silly, I know, but an app that tries to make the world better AT NO COST is so much more than "well, I could vibe code that myself".
Thanks fellow creator of this app. Thanks for believing that this app may have an impact on the important part of our life: re/connecting people.
I really appreciate your words! It’s been months in the marking and I’m so happy to see people also find it helpful like me!
Please let me know if you think of any cool features you’d like to see :)
This is a neat idea that has been tried about 300 times over, but since it's contingent on already being cognizant of keeping up with relationships, people that install it aren't going to people that need to be using it.
Could you share the top 3 attempts that tried it and are better at it? I only know that things like this should exist, but didn't look any further into this class of things, yet.
My idea of what to look into is some kind of CRM for my personal contacts.
This is the first app I built and it’s cool to see something which I initially built for myself resonates with other folks here!!
A few quick responses:
On the AI copy: Fair criticism. I did use LLMs to help structure some of the landing page text. Writing marketing copy is honestly not my strongest skill and I spent most of my time building the app itself. That said, the comments here made it clear the tone feels generic, which is the opposite of what the app is trying to do. I’ll probably rewrite a lot of it in a simpler, more direct voice.
On reminder fatigue: This was one of the main things I worried about when building it. A lot of apps in this space turn into “nagware.” My approach was: - You only add a small subset of contacts (not your whole address book). - you adjust the frequency to what feels comfortable and start muting or snoozing people as they either leave your circle in life, or you feel like it’s becoming annoying. Of course I’m open to feedback here!
On privacy: Everything lives locally on the device. No accounts, no backend. The app literally has no way for me to see your data. For something this personal, that felt like the only acceptable design.
Again I built it mostly because I personally struggle with the “out of sight, out of mind” problem with friends who don’t live nearby anymore. If it ends up useful to others, that’s a bonus, I’ve already gotten 500 downloads in my first day which is so cool because I had a target of 100, now my next target is 1000 (post bug fixes this weekend haha)
Really appreciate the bug reports and feature suggestions in this thread keep’em coming.
For example, barber shops that serve bourbon. I'm a fan of bourbon, but it almost feels like they're calling me out for being "basic!" Or I feel like I'm being targeted like those Axe body spray commercials thought they were targeting me when I was a kid in the 90s.
Anyway, I'm not anti-oak, or having it be a farm or something. But also, flowers can be nice.
The main competitor here is plain old Reminders, or OmniFocus, or any other task manager. A repeating reminder to text that cool coworker you want to stay in touch with isn’t as shiny, but it gets the job done.
I don’t know if there’s an Apple API for getting metadata about recent calls and texts, but that would be the final piece for me: if I texted Joe yesterday, reset the timer on his reminder. I wouldn’t touch that idea with a ten foot pole for other apps, but your privacy policy of “everything you do stays on your own device and we see none of it” is perfect and compatible with the feature.
So, nice job, and thanks for sharing!