We launched Little Saigon Official in early 2026 after about eighteen months of building. The app is the digital home for the Vietnamese-American community in Orange County — a curated directory of 420+ businesses, a points-based loyalty program, transit integration, and a community presence layer.
This post is mostly about the things we wish we'd known at the start.
The directory is the product
We started thinking of the directory as table stakes — every community app has a list of businesses. The interesting features, we assumed, were the loyalty system, the events feed, the live presence layer.
What we learned: the directory is the product. Everything else is decoration. People open the app to find a place. If finding a place is slow, badly ranked, or missing the place they wanted, nothing else matters.
seedScore did more work than expected
Every business in LSO has a seedScore — a hand-tuned ranking number that determines how high it shows up in browse views. We added it as a stopgap for early launch when we didn't have enough engagement data to do real ranking.
A year later, we still use it. It turns out the editorial judgment of "this place is good, surface it" is more reliable than algorithmic ranking on community-scale traffic.
Points, not Đồng
Early drafts of the loyalty program used the Vietnamese word Đồng as the in-app currency. It was charming. It was also confusing — to non-Vietnamese speakers, to the App Store reviewers, to anyone trying to explain the program to a business owner.
We switched to "points" before launch. Lost a little personality. Gained a lot of clarity.
What we're working on next
The web app at sprbot.com/explore — the same directory, but accessible without an install. We're using business-generic routes (/business/[slug]) instead of restaurant-specific ones so we can expand to events, services, and marketplace listings without a refactor.