Hot Topic → Netflix → Airbnb, and a side project that reads my camera roll

Hey Product Hunt!

I'm Johnny. I've spent my career on the employee applications & operations side of tech; recruiting technology and ops at Airbnb today, and before that Rivian, Block, Netflix, and Hot Topic (Fifteen-year-old me would have flipped knowing one day I would lead HR operations there!).

The through-line in all of that is systems: making messy human processes legible and less painful. Which, it turns out, is also what I've been doing nights and weekends for the past few months...just pointed at concerts and games instead of hiring.

I've been to hundreds of concerts and sporting events. I couldn't tell you the dates of most of them. Like most people, I take photos and videos that sit in my camera roll, thousands deep, unsorted, somewhat findable now, but years of the best nights of my life reduced to a cameral roll. A while back I was watching a video of me and my daughters at the Eras Tour; the three of us singing Love Story with 70,000 other people. It brought me to tears. And then I realized I had no way to hold onto that. Not the photos, I had those. The night. The setlist, the noise, the fact that I was standing next to my girls while it happened. It was all scattered across a camera roll and my own unreliable memory.

So I built Ovationly. It scans your camera roll, matches photo dates against the artists and teams you follow, and reconstructs the events you actually attended, then fills in the setlist from that exact night, the ticket stub, the playlist of songs you heard live. You can ask it things: did I see Exile on the Eras Tour? (Yes. SoFi Stadium, August 7, 2023.) It also informed me that the Dodgers are 36–18 when I'm in the building, and even more impressive, the 49ers are 4-1.

So now, when Ovationly finds an event, it fills in everything might not fully remember: the actual setlist from that exact night, the final score, historic moments, the ticket stub, a playlist of the songs you heard live, and the other people who were in the building. You can just ask it things: did I see Exile at the Eras Tour? → yes, SoFi, August 7, 2023. It's a scrapbook that builds itself.

It's been live about five weeks (did a soft launch, almost no marketing to date...going to change that soon!). 97 people, ~300 memories, 1,200+ photos and videos uploaded,~100 memories shared, ~500 memories viewed. Small numbers, but real ones, and watching strangers rediscover shows they'd forgotten they went to has been nothing short of thrilling. Looking forward to engaging with the community here!

— Johnny