What the hell have I been doing? 💭

Everything I've done, and why I still feel like I've done nothing! 😬

It’s been a while since you heard from me…

In May, I wrote that I’ve been working on a new feature for Polar Habits called “Habit Phases” and that “most of the work is already done—I just need to…”

Well, I’m still working on it! 🙈

I wasn’t lying—most of the work was done in May. But, I wasn’t entirely happy with some aspects of the new feature, and I didn’t know exactly how to make it better. I also needed help with the UX/UI front. I ended up procrastinating to finalise and release the feature. Two months and a half later, here we are! 😅

Honestly, it feels like I got nothing done for the past 2.5 months. It’s a horrible feeling, especially considering I haven’t had any contract jobs for that entire period. In fact, I haven’t had a job since mid-March, when I wrote that I was desperate.

I’m still desperate! 😬

“What the hell have I been doing?” 🤔

That’s a question I ask myself a lot these days.

Luckily, I can find out by looking at my code commits in git. ¹

In addition to iterating on the phases feature, here’s everything I’ve been up to since May:

• ⏰ Added an option for users to choose a custom time of day for their daily email and push reminders.

• 📈 Adjusted the momentum chart for habits that have struggled to gain any momentum, making them appear less depressing! 😅

  

• 💳 Integrated with Paddle, then reverted back to Stripe! 😬

  I lost a lot of time integrating with Paddle before I decided it wasn’t the right decision for me. Despite that, I’m glad I managed to avoid the sunk cost fallacy, cutting my losses before I spent any more time creating new problems for future me.

• ✈️ Migrated customers and their subscriptions from one Stripe account to a new Stripe account.

• 💬 Made the “Refresh to update” prompt show a maximum of once every 24 hours

  I want users to refresh and get the latest version of the web app as soon as possible, but some days I might be pushing multiple updates. It could be annoying if the notification kept showing up throughout the day—I knew this, but as soon as a user reached out to share their frustration at the nagging prompt, I had to do something about it! 😁

• 💵 Made sure the pricing table always shows the price the user is paying, including any applied discounts.

  This was important for the next thing on the list…

• 💶 Added Purchasing Power Parity discounts

  This is a big one, and perhaps deserves writing more extensively about. The core of it is that even though Polar Habits has a great free tier, I want the paid subscription to be affordable, and what’s “affordable” depends on a lot of things, including where you live…

  

• 🔐 Added the option to set a permanent password

  Until now, you could only log in to Polar Habits by requesting a login code/magic link. It has too much friction, especially for people who prefer using a password manager. Friction isn’t good for retention!

• ❌ Added the option for users to delete their own account

  I just hope not too many people will use this one! 😅

• 👨🏻‍💻 Published the app’s core UI components to simplify collaborating with a designer

• 📱 Added a prompt for iOS users to install Polar Habits as a PWA

  If you’re on iOS and use a browser to open polarhabits.com, you’ll be prompted to add Polar Habits to your home screen, which makes it function more like a native app.

  And related to that…

• 🐻‍❄️ Added a proper splash screen for launching the app on iOS

  

• 🪲 Crushed at least 19 bugs.

• 📊 Made some improvements to the basic analytics I use to track the number of daily/weekly active users

• 🧰 Deleted a bunch of old code + made some “code quality” improvements—general maintenance.

Whew. That’s a lot!

But I still feel unproductive 🤷🏻‍♂️

Yep! I can’t help but feel unproductive, despite everything I’ve done!

While I’ve been keeping myself “busy” in building mode, the number of people actively using the app has been decreasing every week. All that time spent building new features and improving the app will be for nothing if no one’s there to benefit from it! 👎

I need to shift my focus

I have so many ideas for what I want to “build,” but I seriously need to start shifting my focus from development to marketing and growing the active user base!

I promised myself I’ll do that once I’ve released habit phases. I know how promises like that go—that’s why I’m publicly sharing it! 😅

I’ll write again on August 31st. By then, I should be spending only 20% of my time building, and 80% of it marketing!

Thanks for joining me on this ride! 🚗

It means the world to me, so thank you! ❤️

1. For the non-techies, a “git” repository holds a detailed history of every change made to a system’s code over time.