Wingo

The story

Five friends picking a restaurant will fill a group chat with links, three thumbs-up reactions and no decision, and two days later nobody has booked anything. The problem was never a shortage of options.

It is the locking in, not the voting, that ends the argument. Before that moment every message is only an opinion.

The product

A squad nominates options, everyone votes in real time, and one person locks the winner in. The app opens on a curated list of what is on in Montréal this week, so the first screen is useful before you have a single friend on the platform.

Two decisions shaped the rest. Every write goes through a server function — no client touches the database directly — so the voting rules live in one place rather than in whichever app version someone still has installed. And deploys go through a small control plane instead of hand-run commands: build, deploy, publish, roll back, with an audit trail and a health check that reverts a bad release on its own.

It has not launched. The honest reading of that is on the page below: the tooling around the product got further than the product did, and the day I wrote this page I found both of its sites returning 404 because nothing was watching them.

What it taught me

The control plane was the best decision on the project. Two web properties, two audiences, two visibility rules, and deploys were hand-run CLI commands. Operator/ turned build → deploy → publish → rollback into one model across Firebase Hosting, this machine, and any server, with an audit trail and health-check auto-rollback. It cost a fortnight and paid for itself the first time a bad deploy needed reverting.

Every write goes through Cloud Functions, and that constraint aged well. No client writes straight to Firestore. It felt heavy while building the first screen and stopped being negotiable the moment real-time voting arrived — the vote rules live in one place, not in every client version anyone has installed.

Both hosting sites are 404 today, and I only found out writing this page. Nothing monitors them, because the app never launched and I stopped deploying. A control plane with an audit trail and no uptime check is only half the problem solved.

Onboarding got built twice. The first version explained the app; the second shows you the button. Four coach-mark steps replaced a tour nobody finished.

Gallery

The story#

The product#

What it taught me

The story

The product