I shipped an app nobody wanted, scrapped it, and tried again
I had an app called PicStack. The idea was to help people organize screenshots with tags and categories. I spent months on it, got it on the App Store, and nothing happened. Turns out people just said "the Photos app is fine" and moved on. Fair enough.
I was about to give up, but I noticed something when I looked at my own camera roll. Most of my screenshots were social media posts. And I kept seeing people online sharing these hacky workarounds, like saving posts to the iPhone Notes app, just to keep track of stuff from Reddit or Instagram. Everyone had the same problem and nobody had a real solution.
Then it clicked. I didn't need a screenshot organizer. I needed a way to save the actual posts. So I scrapped PicStack and rebuilt from scratch. New concept, new design, new name: Picki.
You see a post you want to keep. Tap Share, pick Picki, done. The post gets saved with its text, images, and who posted it. You can tag things, add notes, search later. That's basically it.
PicStack was me building something that sounded like a good idea. Picki was me scratching my own itch. I use it literally every day, which already puts it ahead of anything I've shipped before.
My sister ended up being my best tester. She keeps losing recipes from Instagram and memes from Reddit. I handed her the app without explaining anything and she just... used it. That's when I stopped second-guessing the pivot.
Picki is free right now. No ads, no subscription. I'm just watching how people use it and fixing things.
The roadmap is still fuzzy, but I keep coming back to shared collections, where multiple people save into the same category. Like a shared Pinterest board but for social posts. Could work for trip planning, research, or just sending good stuff to friends without spamming a group chat. Haven't figured out all the details yet, but it's the feature I'd want most as a user.
Where things stand: 2 ratings on the App Store (both 5 stars, pretty sure one is my ssister), launched about 2 weeks ago, just me, no funding, no team, built with SwiftUI + Supabase.
Not a success story yet, obviously. But it feels different from PicStack in a way I can't totally articulate. Maybe just because I actually want to open the app.
If you're the kind of person who saves posts everywhere and finds none of them later: https://apps.apple.com/app/picstack-save-organize/id6758291416
