Newcomer guide
How the feed, weekly spotlight, Insights, reactions, bookmarks, and activity fit together — plus practical tips for your first posts.
What is Brainstom?
Brainstom is a social feed for people who build things: developers, designers, indie hackers, and students. You post short demos of real projects (video, screenshots, links) so others can discover your work without a polished portfolio site or a huge follower count. The product keeps evolving — we add pieces like Insights, weekly leaderboards, richer notifications, and polish to the posting flow — but the core idea stays the same: show what you shipped, get feedback, and get found for what you actually make.
Who is it for?
Anyone shipping projects: side projects, client work, school builds, experiments. If you can show it in a clip or a few images and explain it in a line or two, it belongs here.
Home, search, and Discover
After you sign up, Home is your main timeline: a scrollable feed of projects from the community. You can search by title, description, or tags. Discover is there to browse and dig into the wider community beyond your default feed. Open any post to see the full demo, threaded comments, and links (live site, repo, and anything else the author attached).
Likes, sparks, and bookmarks
Likes are a quick thumbs-up on a project. Sparks are an extra signal — think of them as “this fired me up” — and they show up separately in the UI so authors can see strong enthusiasm. Bookmarks save a post to your list so you can come back later without losing it in the scroll. All of this feeds into how posts surface in stats and weekly rankings.
Weekly spotlight and how scoring works
Brainstom runs a weekly competition window (a “competition week” from Sunday through Saturday, aligned to a fixed timezone on the server so everyone’s week boundaries are consistent). During that window, new posts compete on engagement: likes, comments, and sparks are added together into a simple engagement score. The Insights area highlights top projects and top builders for the current week, so you can see what is resonating right now — not just what is oldest or loudest. Separately, the platform can recognize the stand-out project from the previous week (for example via scheduled emails to the author when email is enabled). You do not need a special tag or signup for the week: post during the week, and your project is in the mix.
Insights
Insights is the “what’s happening on Brainstom” view. It pulls trending tags (from recent posts), top builders for the current competition week, top projects for that same week, and a live snapshot of the latest posts — including a quick count of how many projects landed in roughly the last day. Use it to find stacks to explore, people who are shipping often, and posts that are picking up traction. On smaller screens you can open Insights from shortcuts in the app shell alongside Home.
Activity and optional email
The Activity screen is your inbox for what happened on your work: likes, sparks, comments, replies, new followers, and occasional system notices (for example when your account gets a verification badge). You can mark items as read there. Behind the scenes, the platform can also send digest-style email for unread activity and weekly winner messages, respecting your email preferences where those exist — so you can stay in the loop in the app first, and use email as a backup.
Posting a project
Use Post (or Post in the bottom bar on mobile) to create a project. Add a title, short description, tags (for example React, AI, design), and media. You can link a live URL and GitHub so viewers can dig deeper. If you built something with another Brainstom user, type @theirusername in the title or description — no extra field needed. They get an Activity notification and an email (when email is enabled and they have not opted out) that they were tagged on that project. Good tags help Discover and Insights — they are how people find your stack. Keep it honest and specific: one clear demo beats a vague pitch.
Your profile
Your profile is a public page that lists what you have posted. It becomes a living portfolio: each new post updates what people see when they visit you. Other builders have profiles too — tap a name or avatar on a post to open theirs. Verified builders get a badge so the community can spot consistent contributors.
Comments and community
Comments are threaded: you can reply to others and get real feedback. Replies can notify the right people so conversations stay legible. Keep it constructive — good critique helps everyone ship better.
Tips to get started
Ship one small post you are proud of, tag it like you would on GitHub or Twitter (frameworks, product type, “indie”, “design”, etc.), then leave a thoughtful comment or spark on someone else’s build. The feed works best when builders show up for each other. Check Insights after your first week to see how posts move when the community reacts.