Sofa, the app for curating books and movies you like, is back

Started in 2015 by a trio of Philly devs — Shawn Hickman, Daniel Matarazzo and Oliver Pfeffer — Sofa was billed as the app that would help you find movies you like, putting an end to pointless Netflix surfing.

Hickman, a designer with Think Company, recently whipped together the app’s 2.0 version, which comes with a built-in pivot: the app is now focused solely on list-making, and now includes info from books as well as movies and TV shows. Sofa pulls up book covers and movie posters from open APIs like that of Google Books and The Open Movie Database.

“It had too many pieces to it,” the 31-year-old dev said of the first version of Sofa. “I actually took the last year to learn iOS development and built the app myself.”

Matarazzo and Pfeffer, formerly of Monetate and QVC, are still involved in the side project “at a strategy level,” Hickman said.

There’s a roadmap to the app actually making money, the designer said: a slate of pro features to be rolled out in 2018 under a freemium model. But will it catch on this time around? Hickman’s unsurprisingly bullish.

“The second version of the app is built on a thing people already do: keeping lists in their notes app when they hear about great books or shows,” Hickman told Technical.ly. “While that’s good, this is designed specifically for one thing. It has the speed and flexibility of notes app with more information and context.”