App build / 3 min read

Code, Coffee, Chaos: The real story behind building an app

By Rhia / June 30, 2025

The reality of building an app

“Just build it” they said. Sounds simple. But far from the truth.

Building an app from scratch is rarely straightforward. For us, it was a cycle of learning, testing, and rebuilding, starting from a vague idea to creating something real, practical, and useful.

We started with the problem. It was simple, frustrating, and strangely universal.

People were spending more time organising their time than actually using it.

Employees, colleagues and even we, the developing team, were getting swamped under endless to-do lists, with systems that promised clarity but delivered clutter. We didn’t know what the solution looked like yet… but we knew what we wanted to change.

Solving the problem

The goal was straightforward: build an app that helps people get things done, not just plan them.

Naturally, people asked why we didn’t just use one of the hundreds of task management apps in the App Store. The honest answer is we did.

We downloaded the top-rated ones, integrated them into our live workflows and even paid for the premium plans, and while many were impressive, none of them quite fit. We weren’t looking for another way to make lists. We were trying to solve a deeper, more human problem: people weren’t doing what mattered.

So we stopped trying to adapt ourselves to someone else’s system and started building our own.

We began by analysing what was preventing meaningful task execution and why high-priority tasks weren’t getting completed. It wasn’t a lack of time or a lack of tools. It was the chaos of trying to juggle it all and the overwhelming confusion that accompanied it.

So, we set out to build something radically simple and impossible to overthink.

Building, Breaking and Bouncing Back

At first, we built a minimalist task app. Three priorities a day. Simple

We built the prototype in a month, excited to finally turn our vision into reality. Then we user-tested it…

…and they hated it.

Feedback wasn’t what we expected: “What if I need to add more than three things?”, “What happens to tasks I don’t complete?”, “I don’t need simple - I need smart.”

This was our first lesson: simplicity is not the same as functional.

So we went back to the drawing board and adapted our app, not only to add more tools, but to add what was needed. We implemented task overflow handling and built in a “Not Now” list for tasks that were low priority. We later developed collaboration and integration features to handle shared projects and manage communication effectively across different systems, as well as advanced AI priority suggestions.

Not everything ran smoothly. We built a feature we loved - a charming productivity pet that evolved as you completed tasks - but users deemed it “creepy”.

We buried it in settings and moved on.

We decided that reminders and push notifications would help users stay on track. Just a gentle nudge here and there - or so we thought. Turns out users were getting bombarded with five or six pings a day, reporting that it was “Too much noise” and “Felt like spam”. What we thought would motivate them ended up distracting them.

We eventually settled on one relevant notification every morning rather than several random ones. We also underestimated how often people switch between devices, forcing us to rethink cloud syncing, backups, and redesign account creation to run smoothly.

The Final Product (For now)

What we ended up building looks nothing like what we first imagined. We stopped thinking like developers and started thinking like our target audience, building alongside our users and not just for them.

And whilst we’ve come a long way, the journey is far from over.

We are still learning, still developing, and still breaking things (sometimes). But with every iteration, the system evolves to ensure that it keeps up with user needs and expectations, shaping it into an app that they can truly rely on.

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Picture credit: Garsya and lemono