Why I built Homsy
The idea started while reading an article that mentioned a home-maintenance task in passing. It made me realize I had no idea how often that task should actually happen — or what else around my house I might be quietly missing. The information existed, just fragmented — scattered across articles, manuals, regulations, supplier recommendations, old emails, and other people's memories. Coordinating individual suppliers (finding someone, explaining the job, requesting an appointment, following up) for every part of the house was its own separate frustration.
- Describe the house and its equipment
- Generate a maintenance plan
- Add it to a calendar
- Receive reminders
A second motivation ran alongside it: understanding AI-assisted product development by completing the whole loop — idea → research → product definition → UX & visualization → architecture → implementation → testing → deployment → users — instead of isolated prompts. AI meaningfully shortened the distance from idea to working prototype; I still owned the product judgment, architecture, constraints, prioritization, review, and every final call.
Homsy started as a tool for my own house. Talking to other homeowners about it made clear the friction wasn't just mine — not knowing what's required, losing service history, repeating coordination work for every recurring service. That suggests future opportunities, all still hypotheses, none shipped:
- Prepared, ready-to-send supplier communication
- Automatic follow-ups on outstanding requests
- Recurring service workflows
- Grouped service requests across similar homes
- Coordination between nearby homeowners
- Possibly better supplier availability or pricing through aggregated demand
Name, brand, and visual identity
Alongside the code, I explored the Homsy name, a squirrel mascot and its personality, and the visual language — it made an otherwise invisible operational product approachable, and let me explore UX before writing a line of production code.
My kids sometimes call me 'veverka' — squirrel — because I love snacking on all kinds of nuts. Squirrels are famous for storing, sorting, and keeping track of what they've got — a fitting metaphor for a product about keeping track of a house. And "Homsy" itself leans on "Home."
Brand palette (from design/logo.svg / DESIGN.md)
The wordmark encodes the brand logic directly: forest-green "homsy" for trust and structure, lime ".ai" for accents. Status colors deliberately avoid red anywhere in the product — even a failed or declined state reads as calm gray, not alarm.
Autoplay teaser clip used on the real landing page (app/page.tsx).