Shipping Reviewcast
App reviews are some of the most honest feedback a product team ever gets. Nobody writes a store review to be diplomatic. They write it because something delighted them or something let them down, and they want the world to know. That's gold — and most teams read it on a schedule that ranges from "weekly" to "when a number looks bad."
Reviewcast started from a small frustration: the feedback loop between a user leaving a review and a team seeing it was measured in days, when it should be measured in minutes.
The problem with checking a dashboard
Every mobile team has, at some point, designated someone to "keep an eye on the reviews." It never lasts. Dashboards are a place you have to remember to go, and remembering to go somewhere is exactly the kind of task that loses to everything more urgent.
The tools that did exist were built for analysts, not for the engineer who just shipped the build that's now getting one-starred. They were priced for enterprises and shaped like reporting suites. Meanwhile the review that would've told you your last release broke sign-in on Android sat unread.
We wanted the opposite: reviews that come to you, in the place you already are, fast enough to act on.
Why Slack first
Your team already lives in a workspace. That's where incidents get triaged, where launches get celebrated, where the day actually happens. So the first version of Reviewcast does one thing well: it delivers App Store and Google Play reviews into Slack, formatted cleanly, within minutes of publication — and translated into your language, wherever in the world they were written.
No new dashboard to check. The review shows up next to everything else you're already paying attention to.
The principles underneath
A few decisions shaped everything and still do:
- Effortless beats powerful. A feature nobody configures is a feature nobody has. Defaults should be right out of the box.
- A degraded feature should never block the core job. If translation or AI is unavailable, the review still arrives — just plainer. Delivery is sacred.
- Meet teams where they are. Slack today; Microsoft Teams, Discord, Google Chat, email, and webhooks on the roadmap. The workspace is yours to choose.
- Fair pricing. The goal isn't to be a cheaper version of the incumbents. It's to be better, and to charge in a way that a two-person team and a fifty-person team both find reasonable.
What's next
Delivery was the beginning, not the destination. Since launch we've added translation, rating-drop alerts, keyword routing, more destinations, a read API, and AI reply drafts — and there's a lot more coming in analytics and competitor intelligence.
The long-term ambition is honest and a little audacious: to be the best way in the world to stay close to what your users are telling you. This is the first post on that road. Thanks for being here early.