I spent months building my first app. Now I’m realizing building it was the easy part.
A few months ago, I had a pretty simple problem.
I kept forgetting things.
Not important things in the sense of "I forgot to do my work." I mean the other things that quietly disappear from your memory until they suddenly become important.
A warranty that was about to expire.
A subscription renewal.
A document that needed to be renewed.
Something I had lent to someone months ago.
A receipt I knew I had saved somewhere.
A birthday I knew was coming, but somehow still managed to forget.
I tried solving this with notes, calendars, screenshots and reminders.
Nothing really felt right.
Most productivity apps are built around one question:
"What do I need to do?"
But I kept thinking about a different question:
"What do I need to remember?"
That became the idea behind When.
I started building it as a small Android project.
Then, as usually happens, the "small project" stopped being small.
There were UI decisions I kept changing.
Features that sounded simple until I actually had to build them.
Bugs that appeared only after I thought something was finished.
Things that worked perfectly on one device and behaved differently somewhere else.
I rebuilt parts of the app more times than I expected.
I also spent a ridiculous amount of time on details that users will probably never notice.
But those details mattered to me.
Eventually, When became a real app instead of something sitting on my development machine.
I went through testing, fixed issues, improved the experience, prepared the Play Store release, and finally launched it publicly.
And then something interesting happened.
I realized I had no idea what to do next.
Building the product gave me a very clear problem to solve.
Getting people to discover it doesn't.
I'm now trying to learn the part of indie hacking that I haven't really figured out yet: distribution.
I'm experimenting with communities, content and different ways of getting the first real users, but I don't want to blindly throw links everywhere and call that marketing.
So that's where I am right now.
If you've been through this stage before, I'd genuinely like to hear what you learned.
What did you do after launching your first product that actually made a difference?
And what did you spend time on that turned out to be completely useless?
I'm documenting this part of the journey because I suspect getting the first users will teach me as much as building the app did.
For anyone curious about what I ended up building, When is a personal date-based memory/reminder app for things like warranties, subscriptions, expiries, documents, borrowed items, receipts and events.
But honestly, the product isn't the interesting part of this post for me.
I'm more interested in the journey from here.
