Buffalo, NY
Designing and building at The Knot. Building Amble on the side, and drumming in Well Kept Things.
Check it out at matineebuffalo.com!
So far, everything is working out very smoothly. Their website is up and live (and I can’t stop tinkering with it… man did I miss designing websites), and the custom back-end app is actually pushing updates to it from my phone. The dashboard is rough around the edges, but that’s the easy stuff to fix.
You own a bar. You bartend. You take inventory. You do it all.
Your business hours are about to change for the summer. Now you need to log into Facebook, Untappd, Google, and your website to update them.
You’re hosting an event. You create a quick Facebook event for it between shifts, but people who’ve moved on from Facebook never see it. It doesn’t show up on Google, and you can’t figure out how to add it to your website.
Imagine you had an app on your phone where you could update your hours, hit save, and every one of your platforms (including your website) updates all at once. That event you’re hosting? Add it to the app, and when you hit save, it posts to your website and pushes to Facebook and Google.
This is what I’m building for Matinee, my friends’ bar in downtown Buffalo. They’ve been open since 2016, and I actually designed their logo as my senior project in college. They’ve kept the place going ever since, and I want to make their lives a little easier.
I really want to take everything I’ve learned about tech and design over the past decade and use it to help more small businesses, which seem to get overlooked by the newest innovations. I want to build Amble as a repeatable platform for other businesses so I can keep it affordable. I want to make sure they have an option between a basic Squarespace site and a $15,000 custom build.
That’s my goal with Amble, and I’m super thankful that Rex and Kev trust me enough to trial it with them.
I started my career at an agency, designing a whole bunch of WordPress sites. Well, okay, customizing themes, throwing a bunch of !important tags in the custom CSS box, and crossing my fingers hoping it made things look right.
Then we got busier, hired some developers, and started pumping out killer websites for small and medium-sized businesses. They looked awesome and our clients were really happy with them, but over the years I noticed almost every single one sat stale for a couple of years until it got rebuilt. Rinse and repeat.
But why? We built them on WordPress, made the CMS really friendly, and trained our clients on how to make updates.
It feels obvious now. They’re busy! They’re running the day-to-day at their business, focusing on the things that affect revenue. Updating their website is literally the last thing on their minds. Social media gets the updates, and the website sits and collects dust.
I’ve spent the six years since the agency working as a product designer, still making things look nice and easy to use, but now also very focused on the bottom line for the companies I work with. Now the answer feels crystal clear to me, and I’m calling it Amble.
Amble has been in the back of my mind for a while now, and thankfully, my friends at Matinee are letting me trial it with them. More to come!
I decided to quit messing around with it and just launch the thing.
There are lots of different ideas and half baked features built already, but its core loop is working so it was time to stop sitting on it. It still gets me to pause for a second and question if I really need to eat that cookie or if it's just habit kicking in.
I call it raccoon mode — when I catch myself rummaging through my kitchen without a thought in my brain.
Raccoon mode kicks in automatically when I'm deep in thought working through something, after a meeting marathon, when I want to celebrate, or when I'm stressed. All that to say, it's not going anywhere.
Even the AI ones. If I go even 1 calorie over my goal, it feels like I failed. If I stayed under the calorie goal but my macros were off, it feels like I failed. I know these tools help a lot of people, they just don’t work for me.
What I am looking for is balance and more mindful eating. This is where I had an idea: why don’t I use Cursor to build myself a food journal app? Some of these exist already but I wanted something simpler.
My idea was that before I’m about to eat something, I snap a quick picture of it and mark how healthy or unhealthy it is. By snapping a photo before I eat, it gives me a second to decide if I am actually hungry or if I’ve just entered raccoon mode again. By showing me a simple overview of how healthy I’ve been this week, I can decide if I can fit in a little sweet treat or if I should maybe skip it.
I hopped into Cursor and figured out how to push an app to my phone pretty quickly. It was ugly and clunky, but WOW… I have an actual app on my phone that I could start testing in my daily life.
After a few days of letting my phone eat first, I realized that there was something here for me. Seeing actual photos of what I ate had such a bigger emotional impact on me than just seeing calorie and macro counts. It also felt judgement free. Here is what you ate, do with that info what you will.
I spent lots of time tweaking designs, bloating it with complex features just because I could, learning where the bounds of SwiftUI are, and tracking my eating along the way. I built out some things like pattern recognition, I integrated with HealthKit to see how my physical activity affected my eating habits.
The problem was, I didn't have the core experience figured out and I was just throwing a bunch of half baked ideas at the wall. If I were in a time crunch and dealing with business needs, this all could have been seen as wasting time and resources, but honestly it was really helpful in figuring out what I do and do not want this app to become.
Here's the graveyard of screenshots from my silly little experiments.
My friend Nikhil came to me recently and showed me how he accidentally built an app using Claude (hilarious that this is possible) when he was trying to work through some fitness problems he was having. He also came up with a challenge: let’s try to get our apps into TestFlight by the end of the year so we can beta test each other’s apps, and let's post along the way - see his post here.
Time to cut the fluff and all of the noisy features that I barely understand and get the basics right by December 31. The latest is the main image at the top of this post. I’ll keep posting along the way with some of the lessons learned, weird stuff I tried, ideas I have for the future as I try to get this sucker live.
