Your Days

Two things are hard about journaling, and most apps only solve one. The blank page defeats people before the habit forms — and even when the habit holds, there's rarely anything to show for it, so the value stays abstract until you quit.

Your Days answers both with the same move. The daily ask is small enough that a tired person will still do it: how was today, one word from nine, type more only if you want to. And the year assembles itself into something you can look at — 365 dots, filling in one evening at a time. The effort is minimal and the artefact accumulates.

I treated shipping as the finish line. It was about a third of the work.

Your Days went live on the Play Store — signing, store listing, content rating, data safety, privacy policy, icon, screenshots, the whole submission — and then landed on roughly fifty devices with a handful of people opening it daily. The build problem was solved. The distribution problem I had quietly assumed would solve itself.

What I'd do now is start the audience before the app: write about the thinking while building, put the year-grid concept in front of people months before it was installable, and treat narrative and distribution as part of the product rather than a phase that begins after launch. A good product with no distribution loses to a worse one that people have heard of — obvious in hindsight, and it cost me a real head start.