Steady: two paid subscriptions and the rule behind them.
Two paid annual subscriptions so far. Small number. It still matters, because it came from a rule I only trusted after five products that nobody paid for.
The rule: if you find a pain point in a tool you use every day, other people have the same pain point. Build the thing that removes it.
The pain point
I have lived with type 2 diabetes for 20 years. The single most useful habit I have found for keeping blood sugar stable and burning visceral fat is intermittent fasting. So I have used a lot of fasting timer apps.
Every one of them wanted me to track more things. Food. Steps. Water. Photos of meals. A streak to protect. I also deal with anxiety, and a hundred things to log does not help anxiety. None of that tracking ever helped me finish a fast. The apps were counting. They were not coaching.
Build the opposite
So I built Steady in about a week, with AI doing most of the typing. It is anti-tracking on purpose.
It does not ask you to log calories. It does not ask for photos of food. It does not count steps. It does not nag you to keep a streak going.
It does ask how you are feeling. It gives you a three-minute mindful breathing pacer, or a small puzzle, to pull your mind off hunger. It learns the hour a fast gets hard for you and checks in just before it. That is the whole app. The breathing pacer calms my anxiety as a side effect, which I did not plan and now rely on.
What a week with AI actually looked like
One week from pain point to a product on a phone is new. Two years ago this would have been a month of evenings. The model wrote most of the Swift. I made the product decisions, which is the part that still takes a person: what to leave out, where the check-in lands, what the record shows and what it hides.
Leaving things out was most of the work. Every fasting app has a feature list. Steady has a point of view.
Why this one and not the five before it
Before Steady and ReplyWisely, I shipped five small products that failed completely. The postmortems are on this site. Reading them back, the pattern is simple. I built for a problem I understood from the outside. Steady and ReplyWisely are the two I built for a problem I had that morning.
If you use a tool daily and something about it makes you sigh, that sigh is a product brief. Go build the thing that removes it. You will likely find other people waiting for it.
More about Steady: steadyfasting.app
Steady is not a medical device and does not give medical advice. If you take insulin, a sulfonylurea or an SGLT2 inhibitor, or have any condition affected by not eating, talk to your doctor before fasting. If you feel unwell during a fast, stop and eat.