Over the years I noticed many of my friends collect all kinds of different photos.
One takes a photo whenever he sees an exotic car to share it in a group chat. Another told me and his girlfriend have a passion for traffic cones (apparently there are many different types).
I thought it would be fun to build them an app to collect all of these. And of course, with modern technology, we can cut out the object (i.e. remove the background), automatically identify metadata such as the model, colors, type, etc, and put them on a map to find back later.
That's what Loot is. It's my second ever iPhone app (I built many websites before) and it's completely vibe coded. But I did put in A LOT of effort in not making it look vibe coded. A lot of time was spent polishing the UX to give it character and make it fun to use.
The interactivity of the website gives a good preview of the playfulness of the app.
I already got a ton of good feedback and would love to hear what HN thinks of it and how you could see yourself using it. What features you'd like to see added next, etc.
It's a free download with currently no in-app purchases or subscriptions.
For many years we explicitly denied any startup that was already launched.
This was back in the day where most startups had a long "pre-launch" phase where they would be collecting user feedback through private betas, etc before launching publicly.
I wanted BetaList to be focused on early-stage startups and to avoid a lot of debates about what is and isn't "early-stage" I decided on that clear policy.
We also denied startups for other reasons such as using an over-used homepage template (they never converted well for our audience as they'd see the same one multiple times a week) or simply having a dime-in-a-dozen product (which also didn't get many signups when featured on BetaList).
I built BetaList 16 years ago which was one of the first "product discovery" platforms. Years before Product Hunt, etc.
I manually reviewed every submission and unfortunately often I had to tell founders that their startup didn't qualify to be included. Almost everyone would (understandably!) argue their case, but as volume increased I couldn't afford to go into a deep argument with every single founder.
That's when I made https://submit.co a site similar to OP's. The idea being that instead of say "No, we will not feature your startup" I now gave them an alternative place to put their energy.
Initially it was mostly a list of tech blogs, but as more product discovery platforms popped up, I started adding them too. In a sense, I was promoting my competition but it was exactly the startups we couldn't list any way for one reason or another.
Eventually that list of "places to submit your startup" got so popular (and copied everywhere ) that it started driving traffic back to BetaList. (I included it at the very top of the list).
One takes a photo whenever he sees an exotic car to share it in a group chat. Another told me and his girlfriend have a passion for traffic cones (apparently there are many different types).
I thought it would be fun to build them an app to collect all of these. And of course, with modern technology, we can cut out the object (i.e. remove the background), automatically identify metadata such as the model, colors, type, etc, and put them on a map to find back later.
That's what Loot is. It's my second ever iPhone app (I built many websites before) and it's completely vibe coded. But I did put in A LOT of effort in not making it look vibe coded. A lot of time was spent polishing the UX to give it character and make it fun to use.
The interactivity of the website gives a good preview of the playfulness of the app.
I already got a ton of good feedback and would love to hear what HN thinks of it and how you could see yourself using it. What features you'd like to see added next, etc.
It's a free download with currently no in-app purchases or subscriptions.