I just published Dormeil, a bedtime-routine coaching app for Android, built entirely solo. Sharing a few honest lessons for anyone building a consumer app on the side.
What it does:
- Calculates your ideal bedtime from your wake-up time and how much sleep you need (weekday and weekend).
- An evening ritual: calming sounds played for as long as you want to help you fall asleep — you can even add your own sounds.
- A configurable gentle alarm (snooze, gradually rising volume, soft natural sounds).
- A "garden" you grow by respecting your bedtime and earning points — light gamification to stay motivated.
- Sleep stats and a monthly journal. Free, with an optional Premium mode (no ads, multiple sounds at once, PDF/CSV journal export).
A few things I'd do again:
Localizing early. I shipped in French, English, German, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese from day one instead of bolting languages on later. More upfront work, but each locale is effectively its own low-competition mini-market on the Play Store.
Keeping the feature set tight. I stuck to a few clear pillars — bedtime calculation, ritual, gentle wake-up, motivation garden — so the app stays explainable in one sentence.
A few things I'm still figuring out:
Marketing on close to zero budget. No paid ads, no big social following — leaning entirely on ASO, SEO content on my own site, and genuine community participation.
Naming and trademark timing. "Dormeil" is a made-up French word (a play on "réveil", meaning alarm/wake-up). Invented names are strong but easy for someone else to register first if you wait too long — still weighing when it's worth the cost at this stage.
If you're curious, Dormeil is live on the Play Store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.tinyspark.dormeil — happy to answer questions about the build, the localization approach, or anything else. Feedback very welcome.
Top comments (1)
The localization win probably extends past the Play Store. Your bedtime calculation answers a sentence people already type, "what time should I sleep if I wake up at 6:30", and you've already got that sentence in six languages, while nobody is ever going to search "Dormeil". So I'd spend the community hours hunting that question in existing threads instead of posting launch notes, and write the reply so it still helps someone who never installs anything. That approve-before-it-posts pattern is what we shaped Viewfy around, Reddit first.