presale

presale is a resale helper app that generates marketplace listings from a short description or photo, and tracks inventory and profit. i built it because i was listing a lot of stuff on vinted and the process of writing descriptions, picking categories, and pricing things was tedious.

what i built

the core idea is you type a few words like “blue zara dress medium” and the app generates a full listing with title, description, category, and a suggested price. it also works with photos. on the backend there’s a pricing system that uses data from 10,000+ real vinted listings for clothing, and live ebay sold prices for everything else.

the ios app is built in swiftui with a flask api behind it, sqlite for storage, and it’s deployed on aws.

what i learnt

• first time shipping a native ios app to the app store, including dealing with app review
• building a flask api from scratch and deploying it on ec2 with nginx
• working with vision models to identify items from photos
• writing a pricing algorithm trained on real marketplace data
• deploying to testflight and getting real people to beta test it before launch
• the whole flow of taking something from idea to a real product people can download

putting it out there

once the app was live i had to actually tell people about it, which was the scary part. i posted in reselling communities on reddit like r/reselling to reach people who would actually use it to test the beta on testflight. i also shared it on linkedin and posted about it in my company’s slack when the app hit the app store. these two in particular felt super nerve-wracking, but everyone was really supportive. the whole experience of promoting something i made definitely helped build my confidence.

there’s a long list of features i’d still love to add, but the whole point of this project was learning to take something from idea to shipped app store product within two weeks. knowing when to stop and call it done was one of the harder lessons. maybe i’ll come back to it someday.