Crafting a Product With Soul

Everyone has recipes worth keeping. For some people it's their grandmother's handwriting on an old index card. For me, it was coffee — bags cut out and pasted into a notebook alongside brew notes. Part recipe log, part scrapbook. It was a work of art that was useful whenever I make coffee, until I ran out of pages.

Eventually, I went digital. It scaled fine. Every recipe, every ratio, every tasting note was logged. But the thing I actually loved about using a notebook was gone. No colour, no texture, no personality. Just rows in a Notion database. The recipes were all there but it was missing the soul.

With AI models making it faster than ever to go from idea to finished product, I decided to just build what I actually wanted. Something that brought back the experience of the scrapbook. A place where the visuals were the main focus, not the data points tucked inside each row.

What I Built

Brewist started as something I built just for myself. I transferred all the recipes to an interactive canvas, with each coffee bag photo front and centre — the anchor that tells you exactly which coffee and recipe you're looking at. It's the same visual-first approach that made the original notebook worth keeping.

The product designer in me couldn't just leave it there. I added search and filtering so I could find a specific recipe without scrolling. Then the ability to create new recipes and duplicate existing ones — a small feature but crucial in adding new recipes. It's a simple product, but genuinely fun to use.

From One to Many

I started sharing Brewist with friends who are into coffee the same way I am — they all wanted in on it. What started as a personal tool suddenly needed to work for other people. Working with Claude, I mapped out a migration plan, set up a proper database, and opened sign-ups. Brewist went from a personal canvas to a platform where anyone can build their own collection almost overnight.

The shift broke almost everything. Mobile Safari was silently blocking form submissions (this took forever to identify even with Claude's guidance). Google's sign-in flow didn't provide usernames, so I had to build a way for new users to pick one. The image hosting costs outgrew the free tier almost immediately, which meant rethinking how assets were served (WebP over PNG). None of this was in any plan — I worked through each one as it came up.

Finding an Audience

With the platform running smoothly, I put my product hat on. I wanted to see if there was actual demand beyond my circle. I needed to experiment.

Direct promotion such as posting Brewist in coffee communities yielded next to nothing. Sharing recipes had a bit more traction, but sign-ups stayed low. Then finally, I started posting photos of fancy coffee drinks I sometimes make in the summer. That's what got people curious. They'd ask about the recipe, and Brewist became the natural answer.

Still Brewing

Since then, sign-ups have been steadily growing. I've been researching the landscape, studying competitors, and building new features based on what users are actually asking for. Most coffee apps out there are complex and sophisticated — some can even connect to smart machines and track extraction down to the decimal. Brewist is the opposite. It brings it back to the basics and focuses on the fun of making coffee.

At its core, this is a passion project. It's born out of the limitations of a notebook and given more life by everything I know as a product designer. It's my small contribution to a community I genuinely care about. And I'm still building.