I built a habit and goal tracking app

Everyone has goals, but few can achieve them. Unfortunately, the human mind always takes the easy way out. This is what my application is meant to help with!

I haven’t written a blog post in quite a while, even though there were half-finished posts lined up but I didn’t finish them. But here’s another one, which will be my 2nd longest story. Have fun! Over many years, I discovered the right method to get myself to practice the habits necessary for a goal. I realized that a lot of people have problems with this, and I thought that an app would help a few people start on the road to success.

The basic concept

Everyone loves games, right? Some games, even the simplest ones, can keep people engaged for hours. This is because games stimulate the reward center in the brain. When you level up, for example, the game releases a large amount of dopamine, which makes you happy. Unfortunately, in most of the games you reach levels, you build your empire. And in reality, you did absolutely nothing productive and just wasted most of your time behind a screen. But what if you developed in parallel with the game in reality? Many people do not strive for their goals because it is a delayed reward. The game, however, gives you an immediate reward. You could ask:

But Peter, how did you implement this in an app?

The answer is simple. I think all my readers have used todo app at least once in their life. This will also be a kind of todo app, with the difference that it will be a little gamified with levels, points, and progresses.

The functionality

The application consists of two main parts. One, and the most important part, is the goal. You can create them, add a description and icon and the date until we want to complete it. The goals also have a progress bar, which shows how much work you still have to do until you reach your goal. Goals function as a group of habits, which we will move on to in a moment. The second part of the application is the habit. Habits can be added to goals. For each goal, the habits that help you achieve that goal. For habits, you must enter almost the same as for the goal, with the difference that there is no progress bar (yet), you must enter the days of the week when they repeat and their type. There are several types, these are:

• Todo — You just have to tick it off
• Timer — It is useful when you do the habit for a certain period of time and need to focus.
• Quantity — You can count things like the glasses of water you drink a day
• You can earn points and jump levels for every completed daily task.

Logo, name and appearance

Now that I have explained the basic concept of the application, it is time to talk about the current state of the work. Since I personally struggled with getting the motivation to work hard, that’s where the idea for the app came from. The application had not yet been released publicly, yet it had at least 1,000 names. Those who have known me for a long time know that I always rename my software according to my current taste. Unfortunately, this can also go wrong, because I don’t always do research before naming, such as the popularity of keywords and whether it is already used as the name of another app. Since these are personal hobbies and not business projects, that’s why I don’t want to protect the app with a specific name. The only thing is to be unique and be the first. Well, before I start telling you why the names weren’t good, let’s take a look at the names so far:

• Habitally
• HabitCat
• Catitude
• HabiGoals

Well, Habitally didn’t win my delicate favor in the end. HabitCat was used. Catitude would have been good, but it reminds me more of a diary and the behavior of cats. In addition to these, the popularity of keywords shows a downward trend. In the last 5 years, the most searches for this were 10 people. I won’t even mention the name HabiGoals anymore, it seems like crap. While choosing the name, I developed the app continuously, day by day. Finally, after a lot of suffering, I named it GoalCat, because after all, the main part is the goal and not the habit. Petya’s idiotic name, as always. I immediately designed a logo that looks like this:

GoalCat Logo

How is the development of the app progressing

For security reasons, I can’t share screenshots yet, because a lot of important information necessary for development is temporarily displayed in the app. The good news is that you can now log in and create goals or import from a template. We just have to work on connecting habits to goals. You can ask:

But Petya, I thought you made the app alone, so what is this plural?

Well, I actually have a friend who can’t program, but she’s pretty good at design. I don’t have the ability to spend half an hour thinking about the color of a button. That is why Sophie also helps me with design issues, and she will post updates on our Facebook and Instagram pages. I have another friend who is such an artist, maybe I can convince her to do the picture graphics. Since this is a hobby project, the point here is not to be successful or famous or to earn money. It’s just that we learn how to start a complete SaaS app from scratch and that it looks good on my and the girls' portfolios. Well, it might look a little ugly, but I have a couple of screenshots to show you. This is not the finished app, this is just how I write the functions step by step using test data.

Goals list

Profile view

Login view

Sign up view

Loading screen

So this is what the app looks like so far. Although it is still far from the finished app, as soon as I add the basic functions, it will be available to early users, such as beta testers. These users are very confidential people, and since this app has a database and server part, it needs a lot of testers. So, because I love my blog community, I have a surprise for you guys…

I invite you to be one of the beta testers and early users

Whether you want to try the app, get to know the creators (including me) and help us, you can do it now! We would be very happy if you could try it and send us your feedback. I would be happy even if this app helped you achieve your goals even a little. Maybe we could become friends and you could be one of the creators of this hobby project! Beta testers will be such VIP users, with a few in-app rewards when we release the full app. You don’t need expertise for beta testing, just an email so I can contact you and send you the versions of the app. If you are interested, here is the link:

Become beta tester!

If you don’t want to be a beta tester yet, but want to get a weekly newsletter about the development ang growth of this project, you can sign up for substack here!

Substack newsletter

Anyways, thanks for reading! Peace!