WishWhat

Problem

Ask someone what they want for their birthday and you get “Legos”. Buy them Legos and so do three other people. Wish lists exist, but they live in different apps, the grandparents never install any of them, and the person with the list can usually see what’s been bought, which spoils the surprise.

WishWhat puts the list, the friends and the party in one app. You add exactly what you want, by link or by hand. Friends mark what they’ve bought, and everyone sees it except you. Invites go by text message, so a grandparent can open a list without signing up for anything first.

What we built

Phil Honeycutt was the designer and art director; I was the engineer. We ran it from a Discord server with missions, time logs and a push-up penalty for missed check-ins. Between October 2024 and March 2025 Phil designed most of the app in Figma: the sitemap, a design system, onboarding, a five-step profile setup that hands your friends gift ideas, and the events screens. I had an art-less iOS app building in Xcode in the first week, then moved the plan to Flutter so iOS and Android could ship together.

Why it stopped

Christmas 2024 slipped to spring, and spring slipped too. We both had full lives outside the app, and in early 2025 my attention moved to GrowGo.

Current state

It’s on hold. We took the Discord server down in October 2026 and saved everything worth keeping (features, screens, the money model, the plan) into a project pitch for the day we pick it back up. It lives on this site behind a numeric keypad at /misc/wishwhat. If you’d like to see it, ask me for the code.