Why I Built an Ad-Free Alternative to Untappd

I've used Untappd for years to log the beers I drink. It works. It also drives me a little crazy every time I open it. Between the ads wedged into my feed, the check-in pressure that makes logging a beer feel like a social performance, and an interface that's accumulated more features than I've ever asked for, opening the app to do one simple thing — "I liked this beer, I want to remember it" — started to feel like more work than it should be. So a few weeks ago, I decided to build my own. The idea: Letterboxd, but for beer If you haven't used Letterboxd, it's a film-logging app that took a genre Untappd basically also occupies — "social logging app for a hobby" — and did it with a fraction of the clutter. Clean, fast, personal-journal-first, social-second. That's the model I wanted for beer. I called it HopLog. The pitch, in one sentence: log what you drink, remember what you liked, discover something new — without ads, without check-in pressure, without a hundred features you'll never touch. Building it like an actual product, not just a weekend hack I didn't want to just start writing code and see what happened. Before a single line was written, I worked through the process a real product team would use: A product requirements doc — what's actually in scope for a first version, and just as importantly, what's not User personas — who is this actually for? (Turns out: the casual drinker who wants a nice photo journal, the homebrewer who wants precise tasting notes, and the traveler hunting for good local breweries — three genuinely different people with different needs) User stories, wireframes, a database schema, an API design, and a milestone-by-milestone roadmap Only after all of that did I start building — six milestones, one at a time, each one tested and verified before moving to the next: authentication, a real beer/brewery database, the actual tasting-logging flow, profiles with stats and badges, a social layer with feeds and follows, and finally search pol