July 2, 2026
How we choose what to build next
We don't guess. We listen to where real people are quietly frustrated - then build the smallest honest tool that fixes it.
Every app we ship starts as someone’s complaint.
Not a focus group, not a trend deck - an actual person, somewhere public, saying some version of “I can’t believe I still have to do this by hand” or “is there really no app for this?” Those sentences are gold. They’re a problem that’s already painful enough to talk about, from someone who’d pay to make it stop.
Signal over hype
We watch for a few specific patterns:
- Repeated frustration with a manual workflow (“still doing this in a spreadsheet every week”).
- An explicit wish for a tool that doesn’t exist yet.
- Willingness to pay - people mentioning what they already spend, or that they’d happily hand over money for a fix.
When the same pain shows up again and again, and it can be solved by a self-contained app that runs on your own device, it goes on our shortlist.
The filter: could it be a great, private app?
An idea only makes the cut if it fits how we build: a focused SwiftUI app, on-device where it counts, no servers holding your data hostage, honest freemium pricing. Plenty of good ideas fail that test - anything that needs to harvest data or lock you into a subscription treadmill, we pass on.
Plain English came from people drowning in medical and insurance paperwork. Renewly came from people blindsided by auto-renewals. The next few are already on the bench, chosen the same way.
If there’s a small, everyday frustration you wish an app would kill - tell us. It might be next.
