u/Ab17ah

Built a proactive behavioural app solo in ~3 months — 150 daily users, 70% two-week retention, all organic. Would love this community’s honest feedback.

I taught myself to build and shipped WakeAI, an iOS app that learns your routines and acts proactively instead of waiting for you to set everything up. The idea: every app makes you do the work — set the reminder, plan the day, configure it all. I wanted something that just understands how you actually live and does things for you.

What it does right now:

•	Learns your context and proactively tells you when to leave for somewhere based on live travel time, even when the app’s closed  
•	AI chat to set things up by just talking, not filling in forms  
•	Sleep and behaviour tracking, smart alarms, reminders that actually fire at the right moment

Where it’s at: live on the App Store, 150 daily actives, 70% two-week retention, ~5 new users a day, all organic with zero marketing spend. Built entirely solo with no real engineering background before this.

What I’d genuinely love feedback on:

•	Does the “app acts proactively instead of you configuring it” idea actually resonate, or do people prefer control?  
•	The proactive leave-time feature — genuinely useful or gimmicky?  
•	Anything that’s stopped you using similar apps long-term?

Happy to answer anything about how I built it solo too. Brutal honesty welcome — that’s why I’m posting.

Built a proactive behavioural app solo in ~3 months — 150 daily users, 70% two-week retention, all organic. Would love this community’s honest feedback.

I taught myself to build and shipped WakeAI, an iOS app that learns your routines and acts proactively instead of waiting for you to set everything up. The idea: every app makes you do the work — set the reminder, plan the day, configure it all. I wanted something that just understands how you actually live and does things for you.

What it does right now:

•	Learns your context and proactively tells you when to leave for somewhere based on live travel time, even when the app’s closed  
•	AI chat to set things up by just talking, not filling in forms  
•	Sleep and behaviour tracking, smart alarms, reminders that actually fire at the right moment

Where it’s at: live on the App Store, 150 daily actives, 70% two-week retention, ~5 new users a day, all organic with zero marketing spend. Built entirely solo with no real engineering background before this.

What I’d genuinely love feedback on:

•	Does the “app acts proactively instead of you configuring it” idea actually resonate, or do people prefer control?  
•	The proactive leave-time feature — genuinely useful or gimmicky?  
•	Anything that’s stopped you using similar apps long-term?

Happy to answer anything about how I built it solo too. Brutal honesty welcome — that’s why I’m posting.

TestFlight Link: https://testflight.apple.com/join/UJPBqHQa

I studied medicine and became obsessed with sleep — specifically why alarm times that look good on paper feel terrible in practice.

Your optimal wake time isn’t fixed. It shifts based on when you fell asleep, how much deep sleep you got, and your patterns over time. A rigid 7am alarm ignores all of that.

WakeAI is an iOS app I built that connects to Apple Health, reads your sleep data, and learns your patterns over time. It suggests wake times based on your actual habits rather than a time you picked arbitrarily months ago.

After 150 beta users the most consistent feedback is that it’s the first alarm app that feels like it’s working with your body rather than against it.

Happy to answer questions about the sleep tracking side specifically.