getheatapp.com
The pre-launch site
Audience first. Product second. 3,000+ followers before a line shipped.
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01 · Launching - 3,000+ pre-launch followers - Barcelona
Heat
Everyone is somewhere tonight. Heat shows you where.
LaunchingCo-founder & CPO
RIGHT NOW · Apr 2026
STATUS
Store review
FOLLOWERS
3,000+
REVENUE
Pre-launch
NEXT
Barcelona launch
The bet
“Maps are stale. Reviews are ancient. Social tells you where friends were. Nothing tells you where the city is alive tonight.”
What it is
Heat is a real-time social app for finding where things are happening right now - and knowing the vibe before you walk through the door.
Built with my co-founder Jaz. She had the idea. I bought in. We've been building it ever since.
My role
I'm the technical co-founder. I built the app.
Jaz leads UI/UX and marketing - the brand is hers. I own the technical build, product strategy, and fundraising.
The split works because we both stay in our lane and hold the bar high in the other direction. She tells me when the product feels off. I tell her when an ambition isn't shippable yet.
See it
Inside Heat.
One screen. Two decisions. The shape of the product.
~/everything-resets
Everything resets
6am
Ephemeral by design. Threads, hotspots, conversations — gone by morning.
~/your-location-/-who-sees-it
Your location / Who sees it
0 / 0
Vibe, never coordinates. Privacy is the architecture, not the policy.
How it's built
Under the hood.
Heat is a real-time social app with a privacy-first architecture. The product promise - show me the vibe, never where I am - is not just copy. It's a technical constraint that shaped every decision.
Stack
- Frontend
- Flutter (iOS + Android)
- Backend
- Hono on Fly.io
- Data
- Supabase (Postgres, auth, real-time)
- AI
- Gemini for the LLM layer
What I owned on the build
- 01
The real-time architecture
Everything on Heat moves in the moment. Hotspots, threads, conversations, crowd signal - all live, all now. Getting this to feel instant without draining a phone battery was the hardest engineering call.
- 02
The privacy layer
Heat shows you the vibe of a place, not where you are. That's an architectural decision about what we collect, what we share, and what we never know - not a privacy policy written after the fact.
- 03
The ephemerality
Everything on Heat is gone by 6am. Threads, hotspots, conversations. That's not a deletion job run on a schedule - it's how the product is structured. Nothing is built to persist.
- 04
The all-day positioning
Heat isn't a nightlife app. It's with you for the slow Tuesday coffee and the Friday that turns into Saturday. That shaped the app architecture - low-frequency and high-frequency usage in the same product.
The build log
What shipped. What changed. What the numbers say.
Updated as the launch unfolds.
April 2026 - Pre-launch
- What shipped
- App complete, submitted for App Store and Google Play review
- What changed
- Moved from build phase to approval + fundraising phase
- The numbers
- 3,000+ pre-launch followers, investor round in progress
Where it stands today
App store approval pending. Product is complete and submitted. Launch follows approval.
Brand audience at 3,000+ followers pre-launch. First fundraising conversations in progress. Barcelona is the launch city.
Objectives
North star metric
Active nights
Users opening Heat when they're about to go somewhere. Target: 40%+ of installed users, at least once a week.
Key success metrics
- App store approval and public launch
- First 1,000 active users in Barcelona
- First investor round closed
Current milestones
- Product built and submitted to App Store and Google Play - ✓
- 3,000+ pre-launch followers - ✓
- Investor conversations in progress - ✓
- Public launch - pending store approval
Lessons
Wins and failures. No highlight reel.
What’s working
Building the audience before the app. Heat has 3,000+ followers and nothing to install yet. The brand is the product until the stores approve us - and that turns out to be a better position than launching to silence.
What isn’t
App store review timelines you can't control. We shipped a product that's ready and then waited. That's a tax nobody mentions when you decide to build a mobile-first app.
What I’d do differently
Submit to the stores earlier - before the product felt done. The review cycle is a queue, not a quality gate, and sitting in that queue would've been less painful if we'd started it two weeks sooner.
Try it live
Heat — live at getheatapp.com
Heat launches as soon as the stores approve it. Follow the build on the Heat site.