An Embarrassing Moment

While developing my mobile app project, Tip Buddy, I had this "genius" idea of having a built in growth engine to hopefully achieve a network effect. The idea was that if someone uses my app to split a bill either equally or proportionally they could then directly Venmo request their friends from the app with the click of a button after the calculation step. This was supposed to be a growth engine in that it takes advantage of Venmo as a social network and could freely advertise people who were using my app and hopefully get others curious to use it as well. I was very excited to build this feature until I realized that Venmo's API has been closed since 2016. 😅