Sugary.dev - Why?
In every product I’ve worked on, there’s been a moment where a user asks for a feature and I say,
"That’s a great idea — I’ll put it in the backlog."
What happens next is predictable: the request quietly disappears, the user assumes we weren’t listening, and I may or may not ever get back to it. Multiply that across dozens of requests and you get a backlog graveyard — and a community that slowly disengages.
For the Resend + Convex Hackathon, we decided to take a swing at that problem. The result was Sugary — a lightweight way for founders to validate demand, keep users engaged, and close the loop when features ship.
It’s open source on GitHub → if you want to try it yourself, fork it, or tear it apart.
The Problem in a Nutshell
Most feature requests are:
- Hard to track — they live in emails, DMs, and support tickets.
- Unvalidated — there’s no easy way to gauge real interest before building.
- One-way communication — users rarely get updates, even when the feature ships.
The gap isn’t just bad UX for the user — it’s bad product strategy for the founder.
What Sugary Does
Sugary treats a feature request like a mini-landing page:
- Founder creates a feature with a public link.
- Users can subscribe for updates, upvote, and leave comments.
- Founders see demand in real time and can chat directly with interested users.
- When the feature ships, founders send an update and close the loop.
Think of it as a feedback tracker with a built-in mailing list — except it’s dead simple to use.
Example: Dark Mode, Done Right
In the demo, a user asks for Dark Mode.
Instead of a vague “We’ll think about it,” the founder creates a Sugary feature page:
Dark Mode — “I’ll help your eyeballs.”
Users subscribe, add ideas (“Make it follow system settings”), and chat about it.
From the founder’s dashboard, it’s clear: this isn’t just noise — it’s a feature worth building.
When it ships, the founder clicks Send Update. Subscribers get an email:
Dark Mode is live — eyeballs saved.
Everyone’s happy. The user gets what they wanted. The founder builds what matters.
Under the Hood
We kept the stack modern but minimal:
- Convex — real-time backend + database
- Resend — email delivery
- Next.js + Tailwind CSS — frontend
- Biome — linter/formatter
- Deployed in a couple of days as a solo dev project (with a little help from Claude Code)
Convex handled the live updates and chat without custom backend plumbing. Resend made email updates feel like a first-class feature rather than an afterthought.
Why We’re Keeping It Around
Hackathon projects often die on GitHub.
Sugary won’t. We’re already using it for our own SaaS products under Gant Street, and it’s proving useful beyond the original scope.
Good ideas come from everywhere, but great products come from listening, validating, and delivering. Sugary just makes that loop a lot tighter.
View the code on GitHub →
Try the live version →
If you’ve ever had a feature request vanish into the void — or if you’ve been the founder responsible for sending it there, you might appreciate what we’re building.