Rebuild — From Failed v1 to App Store Relaunch
Threw out the code,
rewrote the problem.
2 months
Solo full-cycle
Planning · design · development · launch
After v1, a team project, failed early validation and the team disbanded, six months of reflection led to rewriting the problem definition and relaunching on the App Store alone.
01Failure
Launched, but no users
As idea owner and PM lead, formed a 10-person team with 6 developers and 3 designers and shipped a Swift/UIKit iOS app to the App Store. The core features were editor-picked wine cards and user tasting notes; social ads and word of mouth brought traffic, but no active users. In June 2025 the team moved on to job hunting and the project stopped.
v1 ended in failure, but instead of leaving it there, started over alone.
02Diagnosis
The problem wasn’t the build:
target and features were misaligned
1. Observation
Target: beginners. Core feature: tasting notes
The app targeted wine beginners, but its core feature was writing tasting notes, putting aroma and flavor into words. That is fundamentally an expert’s tool.
2. Diagnosis
Beginners don’t know their own taste yet
A beginner’s “sweet” is nothing like an enthusiast’s. Giving a recording tool to someone without the vocabulary only raises the barrier.
3. Redefinition
Discover taste first, record later
Moved the entry point from tasting notes to a taste test. Beginners need a way to start without the vocabulary; everything else follows.
03Rebuild
Dropped all the Swift code
and rebuilt from scratch
v1 · AS-IS
Editor curation + tasting notes
- Swift · team project
- One-way curation unrelated to taste
- Core feature too hard for the target (beginners)
- Failed early validation · project stopped
v2 · TO-BE
Taste-test-based matching
- React Native · solo full-cycle
- A short taste test captures flavor preferences
- A match score shows how well a wine fits you
- Accuracy improves as you log what you’ve tried
- 01
Prototype the whole flow in Figma Make
Removed tasting notes and drew the three-step flow (taste test → match score → wine detail) in Figma Make first. Fixed the scope to an MVP one person could ship in two months.
Figma Make · Figma
- 02
Full rewrite in React Native · new MySQL schema
Dropped the Swift/UIKit codebase and built for iOS in React Native. Designed the match-score logic and MySQL schema with Claude, and kept a daily build-test-fix loop in Cursor.
React Native · MySQL · Claude · Cursor
- 03
Visual assets with AI, no designer
Antigravity for UI/UX feedback, Midjourney and Veo for the loading video, Nano Banana for icons and illustrations. An AI pipeline covered the design resources a one-person team lacks.
Antigravity · Midjourney · Veo · Nano Banana
- 04
TestFlight → App Store relaunch
Resubmitted and relaunched on the App Store in about two months. Still operating solo, improving the matching logic and UI from user feedback.
TestFlight · App Store Connect