During the holidays, I made good progress on Smart Lists in Sofa, but then ran into some tricky issues. I had to revamp Sofa’s data model a bit to get things working properly. This little detour took a decent amount of time, and I’m just about wrapped up with it. In hindsight, it’s good that I made some of these data model changes because it should make Ingredients more efficient throughout the app.

Anyways, once I’m finished up with the data model work I’ll be jumping back into finishing the UI for Smart Lists. This still needs a good amount of love, but I’m hoping to have it in your hands for testing in the next few weeks.

Thanks for all your patience and let me know if you have any questions!

Cancel your New Year's plans because I just dropped a 45 min video recapping Sofa's 2023.I go over the state of the product, health of the business, quitting my job to go full-time, and talk about what's next for 2024.

Thanks for a great year everyone 👋.

Smart Lists in Sofa are coming along very slowly, but nicely. I finished a lot of tedious work this week to get all of this connected, but it’s starting to come together. Right now only Text Ingredients function, but I’ll be diving into the other Ingredients next week. Open to any and all feedback on this 👋.

Since working on custom categories and Ingredients, I’ve been thinking through the most useful first way to “expose” all those new features in @sofahq. I’ve settled on “Smart Lists” and I’ve just started working on it this past week. If you’re interested to see my progress and how it’s going to work, check out this video.

I’m 100% open to feedback on this too.

📺 New Video 📺

I learned a good bit from running a Black Friday sale for Sofa and I talk about what went well, the issues I ran into, and what I would do next time.

Soon you’ll be able to add anything into Sofa via a link. There are two reasons this makes sense for the product:

1. Sofa’s data sources don’t have everything and adding a book, video game, or music via a link is handy
2. People do more with their downtime than just consume media. They eat with friends, travel, cook, and more

Adding links into Sofa increases it’s flexibility, and allows people to organize their downtime beyond media.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what to call “Custom Properties”. That name feels a little too technical to me.

Here’s my working idea that I’d love some feedback on:“Enhancements”

With these new properties, you can essentially create your own custom features in Sofa. They enhance the experience you get out of the box.

Enhancements sounds much simpler and friendlier to me, and also kind of describes what this feature does.

I’m open to feedback on this 👋

I want to share a little preview of something pretty cool I’ve been working on for Sofa. There’s still a good bit of refinement that I need to do, but I want to start getting feedback.

The working title for this feature is called “Custom Properties” (I’m open to other ideas…naming is hard lol).

Basically, you’ll be able to add your own custom properties to items in Sofa. Here’s the different properties you’ll be able to add:

• Text
• Number
• Date
• Link
• Toggle
• Select
• Multi-Select

Here’s a little demo showing how you can edit the properties within a detail view

This shows how you can edit existing properties and add new ones

I’m working hard to get this out to the beta group for further testing and feedback. First, I need to finish a few things and do some testing.

I’m open to any and all feedback on this. There is a lot of power in this feature, but also a lot of potential for confusion. I’m happy to answer any and all questions.

First time Sofa’s ever been mentioned on The Verge. Pretty damn awesome 👏.

Everything you need to track your movies, music, books, and more

With the right apps, you’ll never watch a bad movie again.

The Verge

Adding analytics to your app can seem like a simple and obvious thing to do, but once you get into it, it can be a little confusing.

In my video this week I share an easy framework I follow that makes analytics more useful. I also share some of the dangers of analytics and things you should be careful of.