Anchorr
Anchorr is a home search tool that lets you enter your favorite business chains and find an apartment near the places you love!
The most fun products to work on are those that you find personal use for. Being the target user makes it easier to understand pain points that inform features, and it's that much more satisfying when you have something that actually takes something off your plate.
Nowadays, with the general excitement towards AI and software development at an all-time high, I use my niche everyday problems as an opportunity sharpen my development skills and try out new AI tools. This was my motivation for creating Anchorr: an idea arising from a common problem my friends and I faced when moving apartments.
Backstory
After years of discovery and trying new places, I've become a creature of habit. I love my go-to order from my favorite coffee shop, the unique Caribbean BBQ at my neighborhood grocery store, and my specific bowl at my Choptle.
Unfortunately, I lost all this when I recently moved into a new apartment. Before moving, I failed to check whether the neighborhood had my favorite places, and I only realized the absence the day after, when I wanted to grab a bite between unpacking boxes. While annoying, the inconvenience came with real costs: I had to pay to switch gym memberships and couldn't easily use the longstanding loyalty points I'd racked up at other places.
This is why I made Anchorr. It's a tool that makes it easy to determine how well-suited a place is to your daily routine. After inputting your favorite chains, Anchorr scores apartments based on how far they are from the places you frequent. Furthermore, you can compare saved locations or use Anchorr off the bat to determine where you should be looking.
Project Overview
With anecdotal information from conversations with friends and knowledge from my experience, my goal was to create a Web App that allowed people to perform this sort of holistic search automatically, rather than manually.
Furthermore, I wanted to implement search management features that allow users to save their apartments and preferences on the platform for later use.
Finally, I wanted to implement a fun gamified look, as this differs from the traditional design found in the majority of the professional products I've worked on.
Unique Factors / Challenges
The main unique factor here was the collection of tools I used. I set out to build 99% of this app using "vibe-coding" tools, since most of my other side projects have been built by hand. The tools I used were the following:
Claude Code
Cursor
Figma Make
Netlify
Vercel
I learned a ton in the process, especially about context management across tools, and was able to finish nearly the whole project in one weekend!
Achievements & Outcome
Creation of Anchorr, an apartment search tool
Google Maps API integration for dynamic travel time estimates
Saved Profiles for the ability to make joint apartment searches easier
Public Deployment
A free pepperoni pizza from my friends for making their recent move a little bit easier
