Garajdaş: model-specific community without the forum sprawl

The question a vehicle owner asks most often: “Does this model year have a known issue?” Today the answer is scattered across Facebook groups, forums and WhatsApp threads — none of them organised per model, none searchable, none permanent. Garajdaş is an attempt to gather that in one place: every make and model gets its own club, users subscribe to the clubs they care about, and the feed follows from there.

What I tried

The taxonomy decision is the product: ICE and EV are not separate worlds, and neither are four wheels and two. One roof, one club model. The name carries the same stance — “garage” plus the Turkish kinship suffix; inside the product it is an actual relationship type, not decoration.

The architecture stayed plain: a single API (Laravel 13) owns the schema, with two clients on top — web in Next.js 16, mobile in Expo/React Native. The design system lives in one file and is synchronised by hand across both platforms; there is no token build step in the polyrepo, so when a token changes, both sides change in the same commit.

What came out of it

The MVP phases closed in order: local infrastructure and API skeleton, identity and club taxonomy, the content and interaction surface, the Expo mobile client, the Next.js web client, a hardening round, and notifications. 97 tests on the API; lint, build and a live smoke run on web; lint, tsc and a bundle export on mobile. Club and post pages render indexable without login — searchable community content is the whole reason the product exists.

Why it continues

Nothing known is missing on the code side; what is left needs accounts and credentials (Google OAuth verification, push notification keys) plus the store process. The next threshold is launch.