Apptisan #023 — Talking with Canopi’s Creator: Carrying on Bento’s Design Legacy? This App Empowers You to Curate and Share Personalized Collections with Your Friends.
For our 23rd edition, we’re thrilled to feature Eike Drescher, the designer behind the popular Link in Bio tool, Bento. Eike shared with us the fascinating journey of his latest creation, Canopi.
Name: Canopi
Developer / Team: Eike Drescher
Platforms: iOS
Read this newsletter issue in Chinese (中文) .
Please describe your product.
Canopi let’s you create shared spaces with friends. You can create a Collection for a certain topic, for example “Trip to Paris” and add things like notes, maps, images, or links, and then invite your friends so they can add things too.
People tend to mostly use Canopi for shared trip overviews where they add locations they want to visit, the link to their airbnb booking, a photo of their plane ticket, and a list to track who paid for what. But you can use these widget buildings blocks to get creative and combine them into all kinds of things.
Was there a pivotal moment that inspired your product’s creation?
Last year I designed Bento, which lets you create a personal website out of widgets, similar to the widgets that I now offer in Canopi. I loved how this system seemed to strike a really good balance between giving people creative constraints, but still allowing for tons of variation in the end result.
During the winter of 2023/2024, I started thinking more and more about the concept of apps and how they store our data in silos. Did you ever realize how your notes live in your notes app, your links in your browser, and your photos in your photos app, but none of these things have any idea about how they might belong together or relate to each other?
So I started sketching ideas for a product that would turn this system on its head and let you create topics that you could fill with any kind of data, so that the note, the link, and the photo that belong together all live in the same place. And in order to create an interface that let’s you combine all these different types of data that all require different user interfaces, I thought a widget system like the one from Bento could work really well here.
What makes your product unique compared to others in the market?
What defines Canopi is that it gives you all kinds of building blocks so you can get creative and combine them into anything you need, instead of defining a very clear use case for it. It can be anything you want it to be!
I mentioned the travel use case above, but you can also use it to plan dinner parties, collect your favorite coffee places, or collect birthday present ideas with friends.
This makes it super flexible and fun, but it can also make it little difficult for people to think of specific things they could create with it, which is why I recently added templates to give people a starting point.
How have you marketed your product, and what key lessons have you learned?
During my time at Bento, I learned a lot about marketing, talking about your work, and growing a community from Valerie Krämer, who lead this effort at the time.
My goal is to share behind the scenes of my work, and have a very close relationship with users. I think there is a huge shift happening in software right now because building software has gotten approachable for many designers for the first time since ChatGPT came out, and I think we’ll see more and more niche apps coming out and small communities forming around them.
Canopi should feel like a personal project, created out of passion and joy, and like something you can help contribute to by reaching out to me and sharing ideas. And I want to involve and credit people, especially the ones who supported this project early on and helped turn it into reality.
What has been some memorable feedback since your product’s release?
I was surprised that so many people started using Canopi to create travel collections. It was one of the first use cases I could think of as well, but I did not heavily market or position the app for that, so that was very interesting to see.
But this observation has already lead me to a lot of really cool ideas for widgets and other features I will add to Canopi in the future, and I’m really excited about that. In the latest update, I actually added a calendar widget to track dates and time, which was partially inspired by the travel use case.
Are there any products out there that you feel deserve more recognition?
Dennis Gecaj, a good friend of mine, has created Dayvlog. The app is a video journal that allows you to “vlog your life” by recording multiple mini clips over the course of your day and then stitching them together to one daily video. And it’s super easy to use and looks beautiful. If you’re looking for a place to record and store memories, you should definitely try it out!
Are there any creators you admire? What outstanding qualities have you observed in them?
Laurent comes to mind immediately. I mean just check out the stuff he posts. Everything he does feels so creative, a mix of design and fashion and photography, and I always feel so inspired when looking through his stuff. He seems to be a super nice guy as well!
Can you walk us through your typical design process from concept to completion? What tools and methodologies do you rely on
I don’t think I have anything you could call a structured design process. Ideas come at the most random times, connecting things in my head I’m not even fully aware of.
The thing that has changed recently in my day to day work is that I rarely use design tools like Figma anymore, except for drawing icons and assets for websites or social media. For design work, I always come up with a rough idea in my head, and then jump straight into Xcode and try to implement the idea. Using SwiftUI and ChatGPT is really fast, and the end result is so much more valuable than a static mockup because it is immediately hooked up to and populated with real data. It also shows you edge cases or things you haven’t thought of immediately because it is the real codebase you’re working in. I think we’ll so designers move more and more into coding in the coming years.
In your everyday life, are there any products that significantly contribute to your happiness?
I recently was gifted this simple little honey pot and it’s always such a joy to use. And it looks absolutely beautiful.
Tell us a bit about yourself and what you envision for the future.
As I touched on above, I think we’re starting to see a big shift happening in software. More and more people will be able to create apps because the process is getting easier and easier by the day. I think it won’t be long until in most companies, the designer and the engineer are not two separate people anymore. Instead, there will just be people who make software, whatever we will call them.
As someone who has started working this way with Canopi, I can say that it is a much better way to create great products, because it allows you to combine the art with the implementation in a way that would have been very complicated and time intensive in the traditional setup. The easier it is to create something, the more variety there is in the selection, so we’re about to see a wave of crazy cool software coming out. Exciting!
About Apptisan
Apptisan is a portmanteau of “application” and “artisan”, signifying “a weekly exploration into the world of apps and the passionate artisans who create them.” Each issue is a conversation with global creators, aiming to uncover and present intriguing products to a wider audience.
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