# Crafting a Product With Soul — Brewist

**Designer / Builder:** Topp Brocales — solo product designer and developer
**Product:** Brewist (https://brewist.co) — a visual-first coffee recipe app
**Role:** End-to-end (concept, design, build, growth) — passion project
**Timeline:** 2025–2026

## Summary

Not every app needs to be sophisticated. Some just need soul.

## Origin

Brewist started from a personal coffee notebook — bags cut out and pasted alongside brew notes. Part recipe log, part scrapbook. When the notebook ran out of pages, the recipes moved to a Notion database. It scaled, but the colour, texture and personality were gone. The data was preserved but the soul wasn't.

With AI models accelerating the path from idea to finished product, Topp decided to build the thing he actually wanted: a digital scrapbook where the visuals lead, not the data points.

## What I Built

Brewist began as a personal tool. Recipes were transferred 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. Same visual-first approach that made the original notebook worth keeping.

Search and filtering were added so a specific recipe could be found without scrolling. Then the ability to create new recipes and duplicate existing ones — a small feature but crucial for adding new entries. A simple product, but genuinely fun to use.

## From One to Many

Friends who were into coffee the same way wanted in. The personal tool needed to work for other people. Working with Claude, Topp mapped out a migration plan, set up a proper database, and opened sign-ups. Brewist went from a personal canvas to a multi-user platform almost overnight.

The shift broke almost everything:

- Mobile Safari was silently blocking form submissions (took a long time to identify, even with Claude's guidance).
- Google's sign-in flow didn't provide usernames, so a separate username-pick step had to be built for new users.
- Image hosting costs outgrew the free tier almost immediately, which meant rethinking how assets were served (WebP over PNG).

None of this was in the plan. Each issue was worked through as it came up.

## Finding an Audience

With the platform stable, the focus shifted to demand testing beyond the initial circle.

- Direct promotion in coffee communities yielded next to nothing.
- Sharing recipes had a bit more traction, but sign-ups stayed low.
- Posting photos of fancy summer coffee drinks finally got people curious. They'd ask about the recipe — and Brewist became the natural answer.

## Still Brewing

Sign-ups have been steadily growing. Topp is researching the landscape, studying competitors, and building features based on what users are actually asking for.

Most coffee apps on the market are complex and sophisticated — some can 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, Brewist is a passion project — born out of the limitations of a notebook and given more life by what a product designer can do with modern tools. A small contribution to a community Topp genuinely cares about. And it's still being built.

## Links

- Live product: https://brewist.co
- Topp's collection: https://brewist.co/toppbrocales