Spont - Never miss a moment in NYC
Category:
Consumer Product / Event Alerts Vercel · Loops · Twilio
Duration:
1 week
Spont is a daily alert service for NYC pop-ups, activations, and one-off events, built and run solo. Every morning an automated scraper pulls the day's events, I curate the best ones, and subscribers get a punchy email or text so they never miss the moment. It started as a personal problem, the good stuff in the city is scattered and easy to miss, and became a real product with a subscriber base and a fully automated pipeline behind it.
Why I Built It
New York has incredible pop-ups, launches, and one-night-only events happening constantly, and almost all of it is buried across Instagram stories, newsletters, and word of mouth. I kept finding out about great things the day after they happened. So I built the tool I wanted: one daily message with the events actually worth showing up for.
What I Built
A daily alert service delivered by email and SMS. Behind it runs an automated scraper that collects the day's events every morning, which I then curate for quality before anything goes out. The voice matters as much as the tech, the alerts read like a friend texting you a tip, not a marketing blast. The tagline says it: never miss the moment.
How It Works
The pipeline runs on Vercel, with Loops handling email delivery and Twilio powering the SMS side. The scraper runs automatically each morning and surfaces candidates for me to curate, so the system does the heavy lifting and I make the taste calls. It's a small operation that runs like a much bigger one, because the automation carries the weight.
Outcome
Spont grew to a real subscriber base sending daily alerts, entirely automated and run by one person. It taught me the unglamorous half of a consumer product: not just building it, but operating it day after day, curating content, writing copy that people actually open, and keeping a pipeline healthy without a team behind it.
Closing Thoughts
Spont is proof that a small, well-built system can do the work of a whole team. One person, one automated pipeline, and a daily habit that people rely on, that's the kind of leverage I try to build into everything I make.
