How did Bingofy get started?

So, check it out, we were two buddies who had just arrived in Barcelona and joined a neighborhood association for the Gracia street festivals. We started putting on little street events for the neighbors with food, music, etc… And we began looking for fun alternatives to just playing music, and that’s where we stumbled upon 🙌🏼 MUSICAL BINGO 🙌🏼.

I got the idea from a friend at work, and we also saw it was a pretty common thing here in Barcelona. So we were like, “HEY, let’s do one, come on!” The first thing we did was search online for some kind of card generator… but they were all super ugly, really manual, and totally outdated… just awful.

So we thought, “Hey, what if we could make it better?”

The First Version

My buddy Ferran made the first version by asking ChatGPT for it, and honestly… we were surprised it even worked! But it was super rough, and we had to pull songs from Spotify into an Excel sheet and then from Excel to the chat… A total mess, but it was the seed.

I doubt I can find an actual photo, but it was basically a table with songs, some of them misaligned, and that was it.

I get to Building the Project

When the first versions of ChatGPT came out, we tried to make the algorithm that would shuffle the unique cards and call the Spotify API with the playlist… but it didn’t quite work out. A few months went by, and Claude 2.7 came out, if I remember correctly. I asked it for the same thing, and this time… it worked! It gave us some code that actually felt worth pursuing.

“Say no more, I’ll have it ready for the next Musical Bingo we do,” I told myself. And that’s what happened. But it was an uuuugly version; it only had fields for the title and the playlist, but it started working for us.

So I started telling acquaintances and friends, “Hey, if you want to do a musical bingo, I can set it up for you in 2 minutes with a Spotify playlist.” Obviously, it wasn’t a massive hit, but I sold a couple of games to people organizing weddings, friends who wanted to throw parties… So, I mean, it kinda worked.

And that’s how, little by little in my free time, I started shaping it into what Bingofy is today!

And honestly, there’s still a lot to improve.