Show HN: Poppy – A simple app to stay intentional with relationships

I built Poppy as a side project to help people keep in touch more intentionally. Would love feedback on onboarding, reminders, and overall UX. Happy to answer questions.

Website looks nice. The copy being so painfully AI-written is a turnoff, enough that my first thought was "oh yeah, I remember hearing about this kind of app, I should look at the other one I'm thinking of". I do like that it's local and free.

Imported some contacts, doing quick setup, first contact, can't scroll down to confirm/finish setting them up. I'm on the SE, which is a slightly smaller screen, sometimes apps seem to have trouble with it, I assume they're assuming a larger screen.

It feels like 90% of HN has become arguing about whether something was made by AI.

I'm just counting down the days until no one can actually tell how much AI was involved so we can get to discussing whether the thing is good or not.

There's way way way more human slop complaining about AI than there is AI in the first place.

It would be so much nicer if people didn't feel compelled to add the 32nd iteration of whining about the methodology used to produce the content.

I'd say I can't wait until the fad passes, but it's always something, isn't it?

I guess because anger/irritation/outrage are such popular sentiments people tend to resort to that kind of content because it makes them feel good to participate in trends. There's always going to be the group of people who seek popularity by aping whatever the latest fad is.

How do you know its AI? Who cares, sounds fine too me.

"Privacy isn't a feature — it's the foundation."

"No feed, no doomscrolling — just intention."

"Not your whole address book — just the ones you'd hate to lose touch with"

"You care deeply—you're just terrible at follow-through."

"You care deeply—your ADHD brain just doesn't..."

Even the word "intentional" alone is an AI tell.

"Quietly" is another watermark word I've noticed lately (though not in TFA to be clear).

"You care deeply—your ADHD brain just doesn't..."

Well shit, that solves everything! What a revelation -_-

Well, if someone can't bother to write something, why should anyone bother to read it?

That's awfully able-ist isn't it?

How do you know that the author is capable of communicating fluently in english?

What if it were the case the the author was so excited about sharing a project but didn't know how to properly explained it and so took the extra effort to learn how to get a piece of software to explain it for them?

Would that then satisfy your requirement that the human behind the project has done enough work to earn your interest?

that was one of the big reasons I dropped FB and Insta.

Low effort interactions just aren't worth it. IF it's not worth writing at least 3 sentences chances are I don't care - and won't ever care.

Like yeah it's cool to see what some guy I knew in high school is up to, but ultimately that connection ain't making my life better.

HN is an exception in the signal to noise ratio is far higher than a lot of other social media - though the bots are hitting it hard these days.

The whole website was prompted. You can tell by the overload of emoji's on the page and every section having cards with hover effects. It's classic LLM design.

The avatars in the "testimonials" are all fakes by pravatar.cc, so take that into consideration. The site is bull shit.

AI tends to be a buzz kill on products because it sends the signal "i can't be bothered to craft this deliberately."

So why then should we bother to interact with the product deliberately.

Around here most know how hard and time consuming it is to ship a production grade experience. AI helps a ton. it's not "wrong" per say, but it undeniably leaves an odor.

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We do mate, we do.

Writing copy is painfully time consuming. AI just does it better, it's meant to communicate and people are not always great communicators. I know it'll write better copy than me.

Terminally online people need to get over this weird aversion to anything generated w/ help of AI. Do you have similar misgivings, like "this guy obviously used auto correct", or "he's using speech to text, I'm not reading anything unless its hand-written"

Get over it. It's here, it's useful, judge the product on its merits. I get if you see spam email messages that are overly tailored and ignoring them because the person obv didn't do the work. But this dude created a free app that looks pretty cool, maybe he didn't want to spend another few hours to create a pretty standard boilerplate website with app information.

I'll bite:

Copy can signal that a real person spent time on the details and cared about the product. Auto-correct and speech-to-text still carry that idea.

Even boring corporate PR language communicates something. It says the company wants to project stability and predictability, which can be reassuring. Slightly awkward, unpolished copy also sends a signal. It suggests a person speaking directly off-the-cuff rather than polished corporate messaging, which some people prefer.

LLM-generated copy sends a signal too, and not always a good one. To me, it often suggests the author didn’t care enough to think carefully about the message - not even enough to edit something that came out of an LLM.

At that point it starts to feel like someone just prompted Claude to build a reminders app with no care or thought put into it, which I could do myself if I find this idea valuable at all and even personalize the hell out of it. Maybe that's an unfair first impression! But it's not a crazy one given how quickly the cost of code is approaching 0.

> Auto-correct and speech-to-text still carry that idea

Why? You didn't spend real time consulting a dictionary or using penmanship, since writing is often slower than speaking. You didn't do your own memory management? Wow, guess you don't care about the details. Used a compiler? Wow dude, please spend the time to actually build the product the right way. These are all levels of abstraction, the idea is the idea. The LLM has no agency, it has no ideas, you give it your idea. It packages it out and communicates it effectively, which is respectful to the final user.

I don't owe you anything. Why am I wasting my time on this so you can feel somehow important. The copy is not the product. Its communication and should be done clearly and respectfully, and if an LLM facilitates with that, I would hope people use LLM for my sake.

> Even boring corporate PR language communicates something

Yes I want to communicate. I do so with the LLM. I might have a rant "stress privacy, go through the app and highlight the privacy features. Mention it's good for kids. Oh and also mention its local first (I would make this first actually),... " Whats the point of spending literally hours structuring, writing, re-writing etc. Communicate to the LLM, and use it to be respectful of your audience.

> The copy is not the product

I think this is an illuminative statement from you, so I’m going to just explain that I (and many of the people responding to you likely) will vehemently disagree: The copy is an extremely important part of a product like this.

Unlikely we’ll see eye-to-eye on this which is fine, but I would encourage you to do some reflection on that. I’ll certainly be reflecting on what might’ve led to you your position as well.

> Writing copy is painfully time consuming

I literally do not understand this sentiment. Do you not enjoy anything that takes time to do? Do you not enjoy putting time in for things that other people will look at?

> I know it'll write better copy than me

If this is the case I am desperately pleading with you to please read and write more. If you think the copy on this page is passable, let alone good, please read more.

I like building apps, I don't necessarily like writing the same boilerplate BS for a necessary landing page for every app I make.

Again, I'm not saying no one should write marketing copy, if that's your thing, go for it. Take your time, wordsmith. But for others they don't enjoy it or are not particularly good at it (i.e. English isn't someones first language). So let's be accepting and get over it.

> If this is the case I am desperately pleading with you to please read and write more.

Please stop moralizing.

If you're making apps for yourself, sure. But the purpose of a landing page is to convey information to humans. Slopping together some drivel to attempt the appearance of professionalism isn't just lazy, it's dishonest. Have some respect for the things you make and the people who may interact with them. And if you don't want to write boilerplate or copy: don't!

> AI just does it better, it's meant to communicate and people are not always great communicators.

Sorry, no. It doesn’t do it better. It’s like chewing cardboard. All fluff, not a lot of actual well-presented information.

AI is also not a great communicator- it learned from people, which you said are not great.

THere's a level of AI generated copy that makes the website look unpolished. I think it's right to critique, in the same way i'd critique an obvious bootstrap css website.

There's loads of factors that may implicitly turn someone off using an app, and I think it's important to let the OP know a critical one.

Do you have it generate fake people with fake photos and reviews too?

A lot of apps try to solve the “stay in touch with people” problem, but in my experience the novelty usually wears off after a while and the reminders start feeling like noise. Curious how you approached this in Poppy — did you design anything specifically to avoid reminder fatigue and make it sustainable long-term?

I really appreciate this work. Yes, it's AI language and it seems it's not polished to run on every device -yet.

And it does one thing really good: be there. Sounds silly, I know, but an app that tries to make the world better AT NO COST is so much more than "well, I could vibe code that myself".

Thanks fellow creator of this app. Thanks for believing that this app may have an impact on the important part of our life: re/connecting people.

"Poppy turns your contacts into a living garden. Gentle reminders, zero guilt."—bleh, at least write your own taglines :/

This is a neat idea that has been tried about 300 times over, but since it's contingent on already being cognizant of keeping up with relationships, people that install it aren't going to people that need to be using it.

Makes me think about a neat feature possibility -- a constraint that means having a garden means others can see into it in some sense, just like a real life garden in your yard. A garden demonstrates to others your care and attention toward it

> This is a neat idea that has been tried about 300 times over

Could you share the top 3 attempts that tried it and are better at it? I only know that things like this should exist, but didn't look any further into this class of things, yet.

My idea of what to look into is some kind of CRM for my personal contacts.

Not sure if it's top 3, but I use Monica https://www.monicahq.com/ which does advertise itself as a personal CRM. I certainly underutilize its features but things like birthday reminders + a place for a few notes (where do they live again? who's their partner?) is nice

I just put that stuff into obsidian here. Only thing I miss are the birthday reminders but there's probably a plugin for that :)

oh interesting, I never thought about using my obsidian vault for that.

Can you share a bit more about how you structure this and how you would recommend getting started ?

I recommend keeping it simple. The Obsidian "Bases" feature is a good fit for this if you don't want to go deep w plugins and DIY (which is also viable but has more learning curve and overhead).

I mean, I’m a pretty ADHD guy, very in the moment, and although I sporadically invite friends or old colleagues to catch up for lunch, I mean to do it regularly, but I might forget to invite them for years at a time, so this might be good for me. I could really used an “Anki for lunch”, spaced repetition reminders for people in my Rolodex, as it were.

You just need a tickler file.

Thanks so much for this! It’s exactly the kind of think I’ve looked for many times. There are slick alternatives that I abandoned due to their (to me) insane pricing models, like “add a few friends for free, then unlock unlimited friends for only $20/mo!” I get that they want to make money, but I’m not paying hundreds per year to remember to call my sister.

The main competitor here is plain old Reminders, or OmniFocus, or any other task manager. A repeating reminder to text that cool coworker you want to stay in touch with isn’t as shiny, but it gets the job done.

I don’t know if there’s an Apple API for getting metadata about recent calls and texts, but that would be the final piece for me: if I texted Joe yesterday, reset the timer on his reminder. I wouldn’t touch that idea with a ten foot pole for other apps, but your privacy policy of “everything you do stays on your own device and we see none of it” is perfect and compatible with the feature.

So, nice job, and thanks for sharing!

The AI writing is a big turn-off: if the app is crafted with the same care as the copy on the website, I'm not sure I want to trust the owner with VERY personal data like that :)

But they have to make money somehow! ;)

This is great, but also not well suited (in terms of visuals, name, language) to some of the audiences that need it most. A version that resonates more with middle aged men would be great. Oak or something.

This is a bit off-topic and not a direct response to your very reasonable suggestion, but I always find it weird and uncomfortable when companies go over-the-top on the gender stereotypes -- even as someone whose interests admittedly overlap with those very stereotypes.

For example, barber shops that serve bourbon. I'm a fan of bourbon, but it almost feels like they're calling me out for being "basic!" Or I feel like I'm being targeted like those Axe body spray commercials thought they were targeting me when I was a kid in the 90s.

Anyway, I'm not anti-oak, or having it be a farm or something. But also, flowers can be nice.

Most of the feedback here is about AI-generated copy, which is a valid signal from HN users but probably not representative of your actual target audience. If you're building for people with ADHD who struggle to keep in touch, their first 60 seconds in the app will tell you everything: can they import contacts and set up a first reminder without getting stuck?

jamilton already found a real onboarding bug on iPhone SE. Get 5 more people like that trying it cold and you'll learn more from watching them than from 50 HN comments about your taglines.

I built something very similar recently but eventually lost interest because I couldn't find customers. It's main focus was sending email reminders to users to contact their friends.

https://alabhya.me/myfriends

Hmm if I were to use this I'd want it synced with my desktop (self hosted). I don't spend so much time on the tiny screen of my phone. When I'm at home or the office I have glorious 24" displays and real keyboards so I just use those. It wouldn't work if the phone is the only way to get to this.

Also I'd want it to connect to my messaging apps so I don't have to tell it when I connected with someone. I have better things to do than keeping logs up to date. I have all my messaging apps integrated into a self hosted matrix instance.

But it's a nice idea especially with ADHD.

Totally love this app. I've always struggled with fostering relationships over time and keeping track of all the little things different people value. I actually tried a friend journal a week ago but that didn't worked as planned either. Once I installed this app, I pinged some folks, had a great unexpected call and now my garden is growing. I value the privacy & local first paradigm. I would have not installed a cloud SaaS app or hidden subscription. However I'm okay with paying a reasonable one time fee for an upgraded version. I did paid for IA Writer on Mac and iphone because their product is exactly right. Your app is similar in the sense that it solves one particular problem for one specific group of people really well. Therefore please consider a paid version at some point.

very nice! I'll give it a shot! I thought about something similar in the past few years. I like the fact that you insist on "no social pressure" and a "gentle" nudge. The goal is not to make the user feel bad :). I also like that you make me import just a small subset of my contacts, to not feel overwhelmed right from the beginning (start small! make it work then make it better).

some quick feedback: - I feel a more natural path to add an "extra checkin" would be from the "flower" in the garden (home page). - I would love to be able to add a date in the checkin. Let's say I know the person I just checked in with told me she has an important event coming up (exam, interview, work deadline, baby...) I'd love to be able to add a specific date for a future checking on a specific topic.

Realising the irony of complaining about the complaining; can we not just have one comment that moans about AI writing and then consider it said?

It's going to be and endless circular discussion going forward, AI is not going anywhere, people are going to use it to write copy. Like all things that irk overly technical people it will be completely missed by the masses so none of the pushback will have any effect.

> Like all things that irk overly technical people it [AI-written copy] will be completely missed by the masses...

I find the opposite is true. AI-written copy is an instant turn-off to non-tech folks but many tech-focused people tolerate it.

The issue isn't exactly using some technology, it's more the jarring copy style it outputs. It's extremely impersonal and it signals low care about quality

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Is this a CRM for your friends? FRM? FriendsForce?

Love the idea! Contrary to the comments i have seen this first time, just the website copy is AI generated hence it feels off.

The review section looks very unpolished: no x-padding at all, a random black a rrow..

I recall a post recently that suggested rather than a fixed contact interval ("message this friend every 2 weeks") it was better to use a Fibonacci spiral (2 weeks, 3 weeks, 5 weeks, etc). Perhaps you could implement that?

I’ve been meaning to build a personal selfhostable version of this. I’ll vibecode it as simple webapp someday and OSS it, should be easy enough.

I see the merit in this project as well but no way in hell i share this data with a third party

I love this! It’s a fantastic little free app. Any reason you don’t open source it? I’d love to help fix some bugs that I encounter.

website looks exactly like a millions of others ai coded tools, that may be a turn off for someone like me

It would be nice if the homepage loaded more gracefully with Javascript disabled -- as it is, it's completely blank without JS.

This is definitely very useful, and something i've been thinking of to build myself. A personal CRM. Issue is when I see something like this - where it will take me around half hour to figure out - while i can vibe code something in an hour which will do much more and personalize it for me, I hold back on trying it out.

Hey it’s an amazing app. I was trying to make an app where user can send notifications to friends when they think about them. I think it would be a great additional feature to your app! Reach me if you want to talk about it

Why is it only for iOS? That fully cuts me and many others off from even trying it.

Beautiful. I am a little worried that you’ll soon lose interest and stop supporting the app without a business model. Do you plan to at least get sponsored, e.g. by some kind of foundation, like ones that are behind mental health initiatives?

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So, I respect the entrepeneurship and technical skills to make this. Well done!

That being said, this is insane.

Maintaining your social network is a skill, just like being able to swim, doing math, being able to hold a good conversation, being able to code or cook or do your taxes.

The "promise" and "illusion" of silicon valley is that all problems (including and maybe even especially social ones) can be solved with technology. This is not true.

Having to use your brain to think about things is definitely painful. It also has incredibly good long-term effects -- and also negative short-term effects because it costs energy. It's similar to eating well, regularly exercising and other aspects of taking care of yourself.

Making sure you can remember to think about other people is not a problem -- it's a REALLY valuable skill that is gradually disappearing.

The problem is not remembering other people, it's contacting them. One always has a thousand excuses to not do the right thing. By gamifying it, and setting reminders, it gives a nudge in the right direction.

It's not different to setting reminders to go to the gym, take your medicine, or any other thing you should do regularly.

And by using this clutch you can train your social muscles so you end up not needing it.

I've used something similar in the past, setting up reminders during the day to keep in contact with someone, using them enough so now I can keep in touch with them without needing the reminders (I no longer have them set up).

For some people there are "basic" things that are hard, these kind of tools are for them.

>do your taxes.

Are you not using software to do your taxes?

Basically you're telling people to not be ADHD. Well thanks but it doesn't work like that. I wish. Reminders definitely help especially because our minds are so bad at prioritising. Tools like this can definitely help.

The page specifically mentions ADHD and the design is also a bit too quirky for neurotypicals anyway.

Duolingo for relationships. The word engagement is hot lately.

This looks lovely! I've been meaning to do a better job of calling friends and family. I'll try it out!

Nice Idea! I noticed a bug during contact import. The month of birthdays are shifted -1 :)

The solution to fostering relationships is getting off the computer and your phone and social media for a prolonged period of time.

Yes!

I am probably too old for this, so I don't understand the purpose of this app. As life goes on, old relationships are either maintained naturally or fade away, new ones replace them, etc. If I don't remember or feel like calling someone, I don't. The only thing I need an app for, is to keep track of birthdays, any calendar can do that.

Genuine question: for someone who finds this useful, how and why?

Looks lovely, but unusable by me as I'm on Android.

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AI writing = nobody will read it. The lure of easy perfection is death to meaningful interaction.

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You definitely slopcoded this entire thing, including all the text. It ha that weird AI tone to it.