Few years back, my brother and I decided to work on an iPhone app together. It was a little note taking app that I dreamt up to help me record lectures while taking notes. We gave it a terrible name… “notes + u”. App didn’t make it. It wasn’t a million dollar idea. We didn’t know much about making something great just yet.
But we had a lot of fun working on this app.
Every day was a new challenge. Everything had to be learned on the “job”. It was like being in The Matrix and learning kung fu. We learned about tooling, programming languages, design, marketing, copywriting… you name it. Everything was new. We read about the things we didn’t understand and tried it out.
I distinctly remember… I would spend hours on making some screen mocks. My brother would say he didn’t like it. I’d be pissed. Then I’ll try again, after maybe spending hours looking for inspiration on Dribble. It always got better with feedback. Likewise, I’d complain about how hard it was to manage CoreData threads… next day, there would be a better solution from him.
There was no mention of agile or process. We had day jobs so we didn’t waste time either. We just kept building something till we got there.
After the flop of the first app. We made many more apps. Each one better than the last. We made a little bit of money, which led to latest gadgets. But that didn’t matter as much as watching a live dashboard of people using our stuff. It was so exciting to see 50-60 people using the app at 8pm PST.
This feeling, it got really addictive. I don’t think it ever left me. To this day, I love making things. And I love to see people use the things I make.
I often wondered, can this not be “work”? Can’t I just make things that are useful to others in my day job and feel great? Work never felt that good though. Something about being in a corporate setting washed away the good vibes. Why was that? Can we not just focus on making?
My journey to this date has been to figure this out. Can I bring back that feeling of making to where I work? I think I can do it.
Our first app, notes + u