All The Things Mobile

Purpose

Born from an interest in the supply chain — not the macro-level shipping container kind, but the micro-level personal kind. Every item around you has a story: where you got it, what it cost, who else in your life might need it. All The Things would catalog everything, making sharing between family and friends effortless, and potentially connecting you with locals who own the same item for sharing or trading.

Stack

What I Learned

• Personal inventory management is a problem everyone has and nobody solves well. You own hundreds of items, but when someone asks "do you have a tent I can borrow?" you have to search your memory, your garage, and your closet. A cataloged inventory with search turns that 20-minute scavenger hunt into a 5-second query. The friction is not in the technology — it is in the data entry. Nobody wants to scan 500 items into an app.
• The data model for personal inventory is deceptively rich: each item has a name, category, location (which room, which shelf), condition, acquisition date, purchase price, current estimated value, photos, lending history (who has it now?), and sharing permissions (who can see/request this item?). It is a mini ERP system for your household.
• Evaluating stored wealth through inventory is an interesting financial exercise. Most people drastically underestimate what their possessions are worth in aggregate and drastically overestimate what any individual item is worth in resale. A cataloged inventory with estimated values produces a number that is useful for insurance, estate planning, and the sobering realization of how much money is sitting in boxes you never open.
• The sharing/local discovery feature — finding people nearby who own the same item — is essentially a marketplace without the transaction. A local lending library for physical objects. The trust model is the hard part: how do you lend a $200 tent to a stranger? Deposit systems, reputation scores, mutual friend verification — all the same trust mechanisms that Airbnb and car-sharing apps had to build.
• The app never came to fruition because the cold start problem was even worse than Crew Queue. A catalog app with zero items cataloged is useless. A sharing network with one user has nobody to share with. Both sides — content and network — start at zero. The chicken-and-egg problem requires either massive manual effort (catalog everything yourself to demonstrate value) or a viral hook (which inventory apps do not have).

Key Insights

• The supply chain fascination connects to a larger pattern: making invisible systems visible. The global supply chain moves goods from factory to shelf invisibly. Your personal supply chain moves items from store to home to closet to forgotten. All The Things was an attempt to make that personal chain visible and manageable. The same impulse drives the Potatuhs brand — making the invisible infrastructure of a creative business visible through events, devlogs, and transparent operations.
• The "sharing economy" premise (Uber, Airbnb, tool libraries) works when the items are high-value and infrequently used. Nobody needs to share a toothbrush. Everybody could benefit from sharing a power drill (used 13 minutes total in its lifetime, on average). The sweet spot for All The Things would have been mid-range items: camping gear, kitchen appliances, power tools, seasonal equipment. Items expensive enough to not want duplicates, but cheap enough to lend without anxiety.
• AI has made the data entry problem much more solvable since this project was conceived. Point your phone camera at an item, and a vision model can identify it, estimate its value, suggest a category, and auto-fill most of the fields. The 500-item cataloging session that would have taken hours in 2022 could now be done in an afternoon with an AI-powered camera flow. The technology caught up to the idea.
• Unbuilt ideas are not lost — they are deferred. All The Things sits in the same category as Crew Queue, Tenlach, and the Butterboard game: concepts that were right in vision but wrong in timing or execution. The best unbuilt ideas keep coming back. If this one does, the tech is better, the AI is there for data entry, and the sharing economy playbook is well-understood.