From a Hobby of Building Apps to Creating Something That Makes Everyday Work Easier

A lot of us have a hobby of building apps, and we hope the app we make will be useful to other people or even get used by a lot of people. And maybe this sounds cliché, because there’s that statement we’ve all heard: “I started out just making stuff as a hobby, until something I made actually started bringing in income.”

Intro

Sometimes people carry this narrative just to attract readers or viewers on their social media, and some of us see it as “click bait”. But honestly, quite a few people really do want to share their story, people who genuinely love building apps and whose apps ended up being useful, or used by other people.

But we all know that building apps in this AI era has become a lot easier. What’s hard is finding the idea, validating whether people actually need the idea we’re bringing, and then marketing it.

Anyway, setting that aside, I’m here to tell my own story, because I also have that hobby and I also have that hope.

How It Started

So, the story begins with me being an IT guy in a scrum team, where every year we have quite a long list of project targets that have to be finished. And like most people in the IT world know, we’re required to work based on the PRD/requirements already written by the business team.

But yeah, our job isn’t just coding. We also have to read the needs from the PRD/requirements, design the system, and sometimes even adjust our timeline so one project doesn’t clash with another.

Problems

This is where I started running into a few problems. I had a hard time lining up the internal IT timeline with the scrum timeline itself, because sometimes the scrum master doesn’t provide a proper timeline.

Then I also quite often had trouble finding documentation/PRDs that had been shared before, because sometimes the business team shared them in a chat or sent them by email, so they ended up scattered all over the place.

On top of that, when we wanted to update progress, or the testing team wanted to report a bug they found, all of this information was scattered in who knows which chat, or which group chat.

From the problems above, we can sum up a few pain points:

1. Timeline is unclear

2. Documentation is scattered everywhere

3. Progress isn’t tracked properly

4. Issues and bug findings aren’t documented

The Idea Popped Up

From these problems I was dealing with, I finally tried to design an app that would bring all of this together in one place. Ya ya, I know there are tons of apps out there that are way better and could handle these needs, but honestly, for what I need right now, those apps are sometimes “too overpowered”. Too many features I don’t actually need, or they need a lot of setup to get what I want, and most of them make you pay a subscription per user to use them properly.

As for the concept of the app I’m trying to design, honestly I’m just designing it around my own needs. So I’m not trying to add a bunch of other features that probably end up unused or don’t connect directly to the purpose of my app.

I’ll publish the next part of the story later...