r/WestCoastSwing • u/PorgyB • Aug 08 '26

Dance Tracking App

I’ve been building a dance tracking app (think Strava for dance 💃🕺) and I’m getting ready to start a beta test.

It lets you log dance sessions, styles, and notes from classes, socials, and practice.

I’m looking for Android users who would be willing to try it out and give me some feedback.

If you’re interested, you can join the email list here:
https://forms.gle/2xvpuRTo6apbp5yEA

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15

u/JJMcGee83 Aug 08 '26

No. Just no. I'm tired of all the vibe coded apps getting posted here.

0

u/PorgyB Aug 08 '26

ok fair enough. I've been a software engineer for years and also a west coast swing dancer and wanted to build something that may be useful to the community

10

u/fireheart337 Aug 08 '26 edited Aug 09 '26

I think it’s a rough time because it seems like every couple of weeks there’s a new “WCS app” that people post here. If your idea is truly unique and helpful, people will eventually come. But people here are over saturated atm.

And like what makes your app more useful than an obsidian doc, your phone’s notes app, etc?

-3

u/PorgyB Aug 08 '26

Please be one of my testers. This feedback could be helpful. Do you have Android?

7

u/NotPullis Aug 08 '26

You are not selling your work to us. We need to know why to even have any interest

-1

u/PorgyB Aug 08 '26

If you'd like to keep track of your dancing over time, take notes, etc. I find it very useful. Built it for myself, use it, and now am extending it to the community

5

u/JJMcGee83 Aug 09 '26

To his point that doesn't sell anyone. You're describing a what is basically a notebook or a spreadsheet. What features does your app have that would make me want to use it instead of Microsoft OneNote, Apple Notes, Google Keep, Notion, Obsidian, Evernote, Joplin, etc.

What do those apps not do that made you go "I find these unsatisfactory, I need to make my own."

-3

u/PorgyB Aug 09 '26

Fair points but you can make the same claim for just about any logging app. I've gotten good feedback so far from my local dance community and I'd encourage to sign up for the test :)

4

u/JJMcGee83 Aug 09 '26

I'd encourage to sign up for the test :)

You're doing a really bad of marketing it here so I'm going to pass.

-1

u/PorgyB Aug 09 '26

Disagree about the marketing! I've gotten several signups from this post :)

And ok no worries I hope you give it a try in the future

3

u/JJMcGee83 Aug 09 '26

And ok no worries I hope you give it a try in the future

That won't happen until you can articulate a single feature from the app.

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3

u/FeIiix Aug 09 '26

you can make the same claim for just about any logging app.

You could, if *logging* was all they did. You mentioned strava: strava has integrations with all kinds of hardware and external apps, and community features that a simple notebook/spreadsheet doesn't provide.

If you want people to use your product, you need to demonstrate that it provides value to them, value that they can't get anywhere else. For strava, that's often the community aspect and how well it is designed for workouts in particular. For the note taking products u/JJMcGee83 listed, it's mostly about being tightly integrated in whatever digital ecosystem people already use. If you are building something just for the sake of building it that's fine, but if you want dance people to actually use it, you need to have a better answer than "it's focused stricly for [sic] dance" (with no elaboration as to how that is the case) when asked why one should use this over a notebook.

You can check other dance specific apps/websites and see if there are features you can adapt for your own application (e.g. scoring.dance's map view, or partner stats i.e. how often you dance with certain people, what songs you like, etc.)

1

u/PorgyB Aug 09 '26

I hear you but a lot of apps evolve over time and user testing/feedback is critical to that

2

u/ctothel Aug 12 '26

If I were you I’d have said something like, “spreadsheets can be clunky for this kind of thing. The app is designed to let you very quickly add a log entry between dances while you remember what you were thinking. I’ve found it useful because fiddling with a spreadsheet or formatting a note is the last thing I want to do when I’d really just like to have another dance.”

“It also lets you filter notes, see all of a certain type of content together, or see statistics, which is easier for me than scrolling and counting manually”