Before COVID, at my old job, we built an app called The Sipping Point. It was kind of like Kickstarter for happy hours: suggest an event (e.g., trivia night), pick a place and time, set a minimum number of people, then pass the invite around. If enough people said yes, the event was on. Otherwise it was cancelled. It was an easy way to plan events with minimum overhead.
During COVID it stopped getting use. Then it got overrun with bots creating fake accounts, and Heroku severely increased their pricing. So I took it offline.
A couple of years later I wanted to bring it back, but the code was so outdated that it was hard to get running. So I rewrote it. The backend is Ruby on Rails, the front end is React. It’s up and running, but not getting much use. I now work at a remote company, and most of my friends from my old job have moved on from the “trivia nights” and “happy hours” era of their lives.
My goal now is to bring it back in a new capacity. Maybe it’s just me, but I have a hard time planning events. I really dislike the group text chains. I have such a low tolerance for alerts, pings, dings—all of it.
It’s maybe ill-advised, but I want to automate organizing fun events. I love going to events; I don’t like planning them.
I want to bring back the Sipping Point with the usual “tipping point” feature from before, but I want it to be smarter this time. I want it to look for new events that me and my friends can do. I also want it to suggest old events that we like to do but often fail to organize because life gets in the way. I think it could be fun to have an AI agent helping organize my groups of friends. Or it could be awful—but I aim to build it and see what happens.
P.S. We have to get a new name. I love the pun, but we’re all moving past our Sipping Point days. We need fun that isn’t so alcohol-focused.