u/toujourspluss

so i had this theory that people wanted deep customization in my app. themes, colors, widget sizes, custom notification sounds. i was so sure about it that i literally stopped opening my analytics dashboard for like 6 weeks while i built the whole thing

i just knew, you know? every time someone left a review saying "wish i could change the colors" i took it as proof i was right. completely ignored the fact that my retention chart was slowly dropping the entire time i was working on this

finally shipped it. posted about it in my discord and on twitter. got maybe 12 reactions across both. checked the usage data two weeks later and 4% of active users had even opened the customization menu. four percent. most of them looked at it once and went back to default

the worst part is my analytics had been screaming the answer at me the whole time. the features people used most were the simplest ones. add a task, check it off, see the streak number go up. thats it. i was so busy building what i thought sounded cool that i stopped paying attention to what was actually keeping people around

the app is beedone btw. gamified task tracker, nothing revolutionary

what finally moved the needle wasnt even a feature. i just moved the add task button closer to where peoples thumbs naturally land on the screen. took me maybe 20 minutes. that one change did more for daily completion rates than the entire 6 week customization project

reminds me of how notion only really took off after they simplified their onboarding instead of adding more features. sometimes the smartest thing you can do is stop building and actually look at what people are doing

anyone else have a moment where the data was right there and you just refused to look at it? tbh starting to think ignoring data is the real founder disease

got my deck a few months ago and i was convinced id be playing it everywhere. couch, bed, bus, wherever. realistically i use it docked like 80% of the time. feels kind of dumb buying a handheld just to plug it into a monitor but here we are

the thing is when i do use it handheld its usually for something i could just play on my phone. short sessions of whatever roguelike im into at the moment. anything that needs actual focus or longer playtime i end up docking it without even thinking about it

tried forcing myself to play handheld only for a week and honestly it was fine for most stuff but anything text heavy or requiring precision was rough on the small screen. also my hands cramp after like 40 minutes which is probably a me problem

curious if other people have the same split or if some of you actually live the true handheld dream. feel like the deck is this weird in-between device where half the people use it as a console and the other half as a gameboy and nobody is wrong

so like two months ago i pushed an update to my app at like midnight on a friday because im not smart enough to follow my own "never deploy on friday" rule. it was supposed to reset the daily streak counter at midnight local time, similar to how habitica resets dailies. instead it... didnt reset anything. just kept counting. peoples streaks that should have been 0 were suddenly showing 47, 83, 200+. the streak math was completely broken and i woke up to a support inbox full of screenshots

figured everyone would be annoyed. braced for 1-star reviews and "your app is broken" emails. spent the whole saturday morning fixing it and was about to push the corrected version when i actually read the messages

turns out people were genuinely excited? like unironically happy. someone said it was the first time their streak felt "real" because it didnt punish them for one bad day. another person said they showed their 200+ day streak to their roommate and felt proud of it even tho it was completely fake

i sat there for like 20 minutes trying to decide whether to fix it or keep it. eventually just... left the bug. renamed it internally as "streak forgiveness" to feel better about myself lol

the app is beedone btw. gamified productivity thing. nothing groundbreaking

heres the part i still think about. i spent 3 weeks designing the original streak system. read behavioral psychology articles, tested edge cases, had a whole reset mechanic that i thought was really clever. and the bug that broke all of it was more popular than the system itself. i still dont know what that says about product design

anyone else have a bug that turned out better than the intended feature? starting to think my best ideas come from mistakes

so my users kept asking for this one feature. custom themes. colors, backgrounds, font sizes. every week someone would message me or leave a review asking when im adding customization. felt like the most requested thing in the history of my little app

kept saying no for like 4 months. finally caved and spent 2 weeks on it. proper color picker, preset themes, dark mode variants, the works. even posted about it in my discord thinking people would be hyped

got like 4 reactions. checked analytics a month later and maybe 3% of users had even opened the theme settings. most of them just looked at it and went back to default. the default they had been asking me to change for months lol

anyway fast forward a bit and im trying to slim down the app. it was getting bloated and i was spending more time maintaining old features than building new ones. so i just removed the entire theme system one tuesday afternoon. no announcement or anything

two months later. zero complaints. zero support tickets. but my day-7 retention went up about 12% because the settings got simpler and the app felt snappier

the app is beedone btw. gamified productivity thing. nothing crazy

reminds me of when todoist removed a bunch of stuff in their big update and everyone was mad for a week then forgot about it. most features are like that. people like knowing the option exists more than actually using it

now im paranoid about every feature request i get. someone asked for calendar integration last week and my first instinct was to delete something else instead

has anyone else found that removing features works better than adding them? starting to think the best product decision is almost always subtraction

my steam library at this point is basically a graveyard of good intentions. every steam sale i tell myself im gonna be smart about it this time and then somehow end up with 12 new games. played maybe 2 of them

the worst part is i know some of them are genuinely good. hollow knight sat in my library for like a year before i actually started it and then i couldnt put it down. same thing happened with celeste and disco elysium. like they were right there the whole time and i kept installing them then scrolling past

tbh i think part of it is the buying itself feels like doing something. you get that little rush from grabbing a deal and then you move on with your day. the actual playing is the hard part apparently

i have a friend who refuses to buy a new game until he finishes the last one and honestly i admire that kind of discipline but i dont think i could do it. the fear of missing a good deal is too strong lol

whats the longest a game has sat in your library before you finally played it

so i had this realization last month. i was sitting in front of my laptop at 11pm and had spent maybe 4 hours organizing my notion workspace. moving tasks between boards, color coding tags, rearranging my "weekly review" template. you know the drill. looked at my actual completed tasks for the day and it was like... two things. both of them were "organize notion"

started tracking it out of morbid curiosity. over 3 weeks i averaged about 45 minutes a day just managing my productivity system. setting up new apps, importing data, watching youtube videos about other peoples workflows, tweaking templates. 45 minutes per day for 21 days. thats almost 16 hours of meta-productivity that produced zero actual output

and the worst part is i KNEW i was doing it. like i was fully aware that i was procrastinating by making my procrastination system more efficient. tried todoist, ticktick, notion, apple reminders, obsidian for like 3 days, some random open source thing i found on github at 2am. the cycle was always the same - new app, honeymoon phase, spend a weekend setting it up perfectly, 2 weeks later im bored and browsing reddit for the next recommendation

eventually i just said screw it and tried this gamified task tracker called beedone where tasks are just quests and you get xp for finishing them. fully expected to hate it because it has basically zero setup. no templates, no boards, no color coding. you just add a task and do it and get dumb points. and honestly thats exactly what i needed because i cant procrastinate by optimizing a system that doesnt let me optimize anything

not saying its perfect or that gamification is some magic fix. i still have bad weeks. but at least im not spending saturdays rearranging notion databases anymore

idk is this just me or has anyone else realized they were basically using productivity apps as a fancy form of procrastination

i've tried basically every todo app at this point. todoist, things, ticktick, notion, google keep, some random ones i found at 2am on reddit. they all do the same thing - make a list, check boxes, feel nothing, close app, forget it exists for 3 weeks. rinse repeat

kept thinking about how duolingo somehow got me to do spanish lessons for 120 days straight even tho i can maybe order a coffee now. whatever theyre doing to the brain works. so i tried to apply that same thing to actually getting stuff done

ended up building beedone. its a task tracker but the tasks are quests and you get xp and streaks and stuff. started as a weekend side project and now somehow its been 6 months of me working on it. the gamification is honestly pretty basic, its not some complex system. the real trick was making it so missing a day doesnt feel like the end of the world. early version penalized you for skipping and literally everyone hated it

the funniest thing is seeing how people use it differently than i expected. some users create like 15 tiny tasks a day - "drink water" "look outside" "exist" - just to see the xp bar fill up. one person has a streak over 90 days. my personal best is like 14 days and i made the thing lol

anyone else built something gamified? curious what actually worked for keeping people around

so im working on this gamified task tracker right. spent like a month on the quest system, the leveling curve, the progression mechanics. the "real" features. got really into it too, reading game design docs and watching gdc talks at 2x speed like a proper nerd

one night i was burnt out and just wanted to ship something easy. so i added a little particle animation when you check off a task. took maybe 20 min. wasnt even gonna keep it, figured id remove it in the morning

fast forward a few weeks and the analytics are stupid. users who see the animation are completing like 2-3x more tasks in the same session. my carefully designed quest progression? moves the needle maybe 10%. the confetti thing i almost deleted? the whole reason people come back apparently

one user literally told me they create extra tasks just to trigger it. "drink water" "look at wall" "exist". fake tasks. for confetti. i cant make this up

the app is beedone if anyone cares. gamified productivity thing, nothing crazy

now im sitting here wondering if i should spend next month on a proper dashboard feature or just add more animations. my logical brain says dashboard. my retention data says animation

anyone else have a joke feature become the actual product? starting to think i dont understand my users at all