a social beauty review app where you review what you loved and hated, save products to a wishlist, and build a beauty identity your friends can actually read.
i've had acne since i was 13, and every reel promised a miracle. i kept buying serums from influencers whose skin looked nothing like mine. friends hadn't tried everything, and on reddit there's no way to tell whose skin resembles yours.
onboarding tags your skin type, tone, and concerns so anyone reading your review knows whether it applies to them. profiles hold your top three products, public or private. wishlists and a "tried and tested" list fill in as you review.
coded the entire thing using cursor and chatgpt, with canva for branding and app design. no comprehensive beauty product database exists, so i stitched together open-source data plus a user submission flow i verified and approved by hand. workable for an mvp. a backend content checker flagged malicious language before a review could publish, and accounts could be set public or private so people controlled who saw their opinions.
ios only, approved for app store launch, and grown entirely organically through instagram and tiktok, no ad spend. i led with the founder story: motivation, beta screenshots, a waitlist to build anticipation. distribution turned out to be the hardest part of the whole thing, and it taught me marketing deserves as much creative iteration as the product itself.