Not the “we built everything perfectly” story — an honest account of what shipped first and why.
Congressional stock trading data, tracked and surfaced.
The core data — congressional stock trading disclosures — is publicly filed but not publicly usable: scattered across government databases, inconsistent formats, no clean feed. The fast path would have been buying access to an existing aggregator’s data.
Built the pipeline in-house instead. It’s not fully automated yet — that’s the honest state of it today, not a finished system pretending otherwise.
A meme-style parody app for the group chat: type a silly question, set joke odds, and share a realistic-looking fake prediction-market card. Free on the App Store, with an optional Allegedly Gold subscription (no ads, extra card looks, a pinned comment of your own).
App Review rejected it under Guideline 1.1.1 (objectionable content) twice, on September 23 and September 30; an earlier build had also been rejected for a keyboard bug.
The fix was a repositioning and a narrowing, not a new idea. The app became a meme-style parody for the group chat. Three of its eight comment tones, the edgiest ones, were deleted. Every example question was rewritten around situations instead of named people. Two features that weren’t the problem but added surface area, GIF export and a send-to-contacts flow, came out too. And user-content safeguards went in: a content filter in the app and on the public share pages, a “before you send” prompt on each card, and a “Report this card” link on shared cards.
The product depends on one moment: someone gets a card in a group chat and makes one back. A shared card is an image plus a link. The link opens a server-rendered page on Cloudflare Pages that rebuilds the same card from a few parameters, using the same card code as the app, with a per-card preview image for the chat.
Branch deep linking was integrated, then switched off during its trial; “Make one back” now goes straight to the App Store.
A free tier with ads (Google AdMob) and Allegedly Gold through RevenueCat: weekly with a 7-day free trial, and yearly. A Monthly plan was created, then pulled from sale after App Review flagged it as missing from the binary.