Your camera roll has been training for this

Cupd started from something ridiculously ordinary: people already take photos of their coffee constantly. My camera roll was full of them. My friends' camera rolls were full of them. It's one of those things we photograph without really deciding to.

Cafés get photographed more than almost anything else in daily life, and none of those photos go anywhere. They sit in a camera roll until your phone runs out of storage, then get deleted without ever being looked at again.

So instead of trying to invent a new behaviour, Cupd is built around one people already have. Take a photo. Add the café. Rate the coffee. Share it. That's the whole loop.

The product lesson I keep coming back to is that the best ideas don't always need you to teach people something new. Sometimes you just have to give an existing habit somewhere to live.

Cupd became my first proper iOS app. It's built with React Native and Expo, TypeScript, Supabase on the backend, and Google Places for finding cafés. None of that matters to the person using it, obviously, they just want to remember what the flat white at that place round the corner was actually called.