1st timer x 1 month build - Made an iOS app that plays music the moment you arrive somewhere

Hi PH 👋

I'm Jason. A month ago I'd never built a product before. A month ago today I started building one. It's launching on Wednesday and I'm still slightly wide-eyed about it.

The why: I read Ready Player Two and there's a moment where music kicks in the second a character arrives somewhere meaningful. That sat with me. It pulled up a load of memories — Sunday afternoons pulling up to the game with AC/DC blasting, the song already half-finished by the time we got to the car park. Hunting for the right banger before walking into the gym. Picking up my brother and knowing exactly which track he'd want playing as he opened the door.

Shortcuts can do a basic version of this — set a location, play a track. But none of it did the full thing I had in my head: starting a song at a specific point rather than always from the beginning. Geofence sizing you can tune per place — a small radius for a flat, a bigger one for a stadium. Roadtrip Drops that trigger a song halfway through a journey, for those proper family-road-trip moments. And the whole lot wired into Calendar and Contacts, so a meeting auto-becomes a drop and a friend's contact card does too.

So I built it.

It's called Nearplay. Geofencing + Apple Music. Save a place, pin a song, arrive, the music takes over whatever was playing.

The feature I ended up proudest of isn't actually for Apple Music subscribers. iTunes still sells individual tracks for 99p — buy one song for one place and it's yours forever, no monthly fee. Buying my parents' song to hear every time I pull onto their drive hits a bit differently when I actually own it.

Honest status report: all I've really done so far is a few Reddit posts. But two complete strangers (no family, no friends) have actually paid for it — which was amazing to see. The first time one of those notifications came through I think I just stared at my phone for a bit.

A real question for the maker community here, and a slightly nervous one given this is my first time doing any of this: my best feedback so far hasn't come from anything I'd call marketing. It's come from friends who've used the app for a couple of weeks and arrived somewhere it caught them off guard. How do you scale that depth of feedback as you grow past the people you can DM personally? Especially curious from anyone who's launched a product where the value only lands after a few real-world moments.

Launching properly on Wednesday. For now I'm just here to learn. Happy to chat with anyone working on indie iOS, location-based things, or anyone else who's just shipped their first thing and is still figuring out which way is up.

— Jason