Sometime back I was invited for a party and the host had used an app to track invites – they had used https://rsvpify.com/ and after a quick look at the website, I realized that product is quite expensive – does a simple app that manages invites for you need to be that expensive?

Checked out a couple of other ‘invite’ management apps on the AppStore – most had unintuitive UI, were bloated with ads and seemed complex to use.

And since I hadn’t built anything in quite a while, decided to give it a try. And to keep myself accountable, I am going to build this in public with weekly updates till first launch – which would be on 2nd September 2024.

QuickRSVP would let the users:

• quickly create invites for a party
• The host can share the link to the party externally through social media apps, whatsapp etc
• See the status of the invites and nag people for a response.
• Invitees would be able to either accept or reject the invite.
  

The product would have a iOS app and a standalone web interface as well. For tech stack, the iOS app would SwiftUI to build the UI + SwiftData to persist locally -> this might feel like a overkill and it is. I am using this side project to ramp up my SwiftUI skillset – even though the product does not really need a iOS app.

The backend would be powered AWS lambda functions. For the web interface, I am planning to use Flutter but I haven’t made up my mind yet – again the stack here is not really decided by what the product needs, but instead what I want to learn.

Right now, I have most of the end-points already completed in AWS and I am working on the iOS app – struggling with SwiftUI quite a bit to be honest – but I think I should be able to wrap up most of the functionality by this the end of this week.

Getting the UI to look nice is whole another ball game though – I am not sure how to go about this. I have zero artistic abilities 🙂

Do people hire designers even for their side projects? Need to figure this out.

During the second week I will focus on the web app – need to ramp up on Flutter before that.

The V0 launch in September wont’ be pretty – but it should have all of the functionality that a RSVP app needs to have. If everthing goes well, I will push an update later that improves on the UI design.

For MVP, I want to focus on core functionality + deployment and being able to ship on time.