PoquitoTalk lets English-speaking expats type a message and send it as a natural Panamanian Spanish voice note on WhatsApp. This page collects 60 days of build logs, community feedback, store rejections, video tests, and first revenue from Bocas del Toro, Panama.
I said I'd ship the stacked-card directory before Day 8 ended, and posted it that night. 909 views and 14 likes: one of my best-performing posts.
Click through any of the six primary channels below to audit our live public progress, code commits, and production deployments.
Direct live query of all build-in-public posts, technical breakdowns, and community interactions shared on X.
Every Shipaton milestone, daily ship log, and design progression from Day 1 to the final submission.
Video demonstrations, two-phone walkie tests, comedy sketches, and field tests on boats in Bocas del Toro.
Explore the full repository: React Native Expo app, audio pipeline, RevenueCat and Stripe integration, and commit logs.
Production Android release (com.heroapps.poquitotalk v1.5.10) with 1-tap Panamanian audio translation.
Short videos from the island: comedy skits, practical tips, and the daily clips from our Layers growth loop.
Over 60 public build logs, community reviews, and Google Play milestones, cut into 16 seconds.
Three versions in one month. The first rebuild came from another builder on X, the second from Google Play review.
Only the second paywall I had ever made, posted as-is. The purchase button used the same terracotta as the rest of the app.
Jay (@SlowbrewedS) replied with three fixes. That same evening the purchase button was indigo, a color used nowhere else in the app. His follow-up suggested "Try it first" instead of "Or continue with Free Version".
Review rejected the build: "$3.33/mo" was bigger than the $39.99 actually billed each year. Now the yearly price leads and the monthly breakdown sits underneath.
"The CTA does not respect the pattern break principle: get one distinct color token for the purchase CTA that nothing else in the app's palette uses."Jay, @SlowbrewedS, iOS product engineer at SlowBrewed Labs · reply on X, Aug 28
Posts where I asked for input, and what shipped because of the answers.
Asked the island's own Facebook forum before building anything. One reply: "Most of my calls are not repairs, but medical."
Shipped: medical and pharmacy phrases, next to the repair categories
Local workers told me: "We try to speak English, but they don't understand our accents."
Shipped: the 2-way walkie-talkie, so contractors can answer back in Spanish
Scott (Layers), answering my question about what to do with a folder full of build-in-public screenshots.
Shipped: the day-1-to-Google-Play timeline in our demo video
Shared the full onboarding flow for critique before building it into the app.
Shipped: a refined 3-step onboarding flow
Posted the first store screenshot alone, asked what to change, then built the other three from the replies.
Shipped: the 4 Google Play listing screenshots"If your Play listing screenshots still show the old [paywall], the reviewer sees the same billing violation again. And once the build is in review, don't edit the listing."@KindnessCFdn, Kindness Community Foundation
Checked: the store screenshots never showed the paywall, so the resubmission was safe.
"After subscription fixes: delete the app, reinstall, sign in on the same store account and hit restore. That path rarely gets retested after the purchase flow changes."@gemmeinhq, Gemmein
Added to the release checklist: a clean reinstall and restore test.
While the app was being built and reviewed, the website did two jobs: a waitlist for the Android app, and free sign-up forms for local providers. The numbers are small, but they're real people.
The website on August 11: "Get notified when PoquitoTalk hits Google Play", with the provider sign-up right below it. We count only real sign-ups: our own test entries are left out. Two of the six were local providers themselves. Now that Android is live, the same spot holds the iPhone waitlist.
Our admin page: the Android waitlist, with emails blurred.
The first seven approved providers in our admin page, contact details blurred. Scroll to see them all.
The providers who signed up themselves through the website, now part of the 287 listings in the free directory:
Ten years of tours across the archipelago, from bioluminescence to manatees.
4x4 cars and UTVs for 5 to 8 people.
Car parts, bike racks, security doors and windows.
Natural soil health and pruning.
Repairs, carpentry, gardens and property upkeep.
Installs to European standards, Starlink setup and safety checks.
Air conditioning and fridges.
Safe, precise tree work, with references.
22 years of experience, goes anywhere.
Building in public didn't stop at X. I posted in the Bocas community groups, opened a dedicated PoquitoTalk Facebook page (1.3K viewers in September, from zero followers), and started messaging local providers directly.
Announced the Google Play submission to friends and neighbours on the island: 19 reactions, 7 comments.
Signal: people here want this
Besides five free sign-up portals, we message the islands' Hope Spot certified boat captains directly on WhatsApp: no form, one step less. 6 messaged, 5 replied, several by voice note.
Next: help providers who can't sign up alone, with a voice-note interview and a photo of their storefront
A local business added itself to the directory from my post, so I added a gardening category to give it the right home.
Shipped: Gardening & Nurseries categoryBuilding in public is only meaningful when community feedback actively changes the code. Here is how public scrutiny reshaped PoquitoTalk:
I posted my raw paywall on X and got a blunt critique from Jay (@SlowbrewedS), an iOS product engineer. The same evening, the in-app paywall button got a color used nowhere else in the app (indigo #4F46E5). His follow-up swapped "Or continue with Free Version" for a simple "Try it first".
A female boat operator's reply shouldn't come back in a male English voice. Your own voice setting only applies to the Spanish you send; incoming replies need to match the person who spoke. The fix is built so the contractor never has to do anything: the voice is guessed from the contact's name, the expat can change it with one tap, and unclear names like Guadalupe or "Taxi 25" get a neutral voice instead of a wrong one. It ships in v1.5.11, after v1.5.10 is live.
After 14 years living in Bocas del Toro, I realized software built for social good cannot force behavioral changes onto local workers. If an app requires a boat captain steering through waves to download an English app, it fails. We placed 100% of the friction on the expat: outbound audio formats into native WhatsApp voice notes, paired with the zero-install 2-way web walkie link.
Read the full story on HackerNoon →Woke up to a rejection for v1.5.5 on a Sunday morning. It worked like a free audit: the reviewer caught a cold launch crash, a "$3.33/mo" price shown bigger than the $39.99 actually billed per year, and a mascot that vanished in release builds. We published the full post-mortem: diagnosing an animated WebP memory bug, making the yearly price the main price on the paywall, fixing Android 13 notification handlers, and shipping v1.5.9.
Read the Google Play Autopsy & AI Tennis Dispatch →A tourist visiting Bocas for 5 days will never commit to a $39.99/year app store subscription, so we sell a one-time 50-credit pack on the web, through a RevenueCat funnel with Stripe, redeemable in the app. Our first web customer was my mom in Belgium. Every founder's first customer is family. Thanks, Mom.
See Revenue on the Shipaton Leaderboard →Not every experiment paid off. These are from the public posts too.
Posted the first PoquitoTalk video to YT Shorts: close to 0 views.
A new channel starts at zero, however good the video is.
An OCR scanner for seafood menus, tourist vs. expat personas: all cut.
Not every good idea belongs in version 1.
Couldn't even create a second TikTok account over Starlink: security checks and carrier errors.
It took a clean, isolated macOS setup to finally get a working US account.
Wanted to print T-shirts and start hitting the pavement in town, but had to wait for approval first.
Offline distribution depends on the store timeline. Plan around it.
The solar inverter failed, the Starlink router died, and a flaky hotspot posted the same ship log three times.
Kept shipping on cellular data, one short log a day.
Version 1.5.5 was rejected for a crash, the pricing layout, and a missing mascot.
Fixed all three and shipped v1.5.9 the same day.
Comprehensive deep-dives documenting our product decisions, architecture, and marketing tests:
Playing AI tennis between Claude and Antigravity, fixing WebP memory drops, and pushing v1.5.9.
14 years in Bocas, the Zero-Burden Principle, and why the contractor never installs anything.
Pivoting my translation career through Shipaton 2026.
What actually shipped: layered speech-to-text, Panamanian dialect rules, ElevenLabs voices and a PHP walkie-talkie.
