Ripple

Ripple was a second-screen companion for TV and streaming. You picked an episode, started a timer alongside it, and tapped a thumbs up, a thumbs down or a short comment at the moments that grabbed you. Every reaction was stored against its timestamp, so each episode built up a sentiment curve showing what other viewers felt at the same moments, even if they watched weeks apart.

Earlier second-screen apps failed because they depended on live, synchronised viewing, which streaming has killed. Ripple aggregated reactions across time instead, so the timeline stayed useful whenever you watched. The cold-start problem was the big risk, so show and episode data came from TMDb, and a Ripple Bot seeded episodes with comments.

It’s one of my Lean Machine experiments: a Flutter Web app on Supabase, with follows, profiles and Google, Apple and Discord sign-in. It soft-launched in March 2026, but after an initial burst of visits there was no ongoing usage, and I shut it down on 1 October 2026.