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Paul Uhlig
Paul Uhlig

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I built an app whose only success metric is how fast you close it

Most products I've worked on measure success by time-in-app. Fiamo is my attempt at the opposite: a tiny PWA that gives everyone on Earth the same one real-life quest each day — give a stranger an honest compliment, eat one meal without your phone — and once you mark it done, it tells you to close it and go live your life.

The anti-engagement constraints I committed to:

  • No accounts. An anonymous UUID in localStorage is the whole identity system.
  • No feed. There is nothing to scroll, by design.
  • One quest per day, deterministic by UTC date, same for the whole planet.
  • A live world counter ("N people did today's quest with you") polled from Supabase.
  • Photos on share cards are composited client-side and never leave the device.
  • No ads, no trackers, no third-party cookies.

Stack: React PWA on Cloudflare Pages, Supabase (Postgres + RLS) for streaks/counters, service worker with network-first caching. Total hosting cost: €0/month.

What I'd love feedback on from dev.to:

  1. Streak recovery without accounts: from day 3 you can generate a short recovery code (or optionally add an email). Is that enough, or does no-login break down here?
  2. The service worker bit me hard: my first cache-first SW froze old bundles for returning users. Switched to network-first with cache busting — curious how others handle SW update strategies for fast-moving PWAs.
  3. Is 'the app wants you to leave' a real product thesis or just a constraint I fell in love with?

One more thing I'm oddly proud of: every completed quest becomes a permanent petal of a single shared organism — one creature, the same for every eye on Earth. You can't click it bigger; it only grows when someone actually does their quest in the real world. It's my favorite kind of counter: one you can't inflate.

Try it (free, no signup): https://fiamo.pages.dev

Honest teardowns welcome — it's tiny and early, and feedback beats upvotes.


Update, 20 Aug. It went live on Product Hunt this morning: https://www.producthunt.com/products/fiamo

Six hours in: 89 people have opened it, 12 quests marked done. Yesterday those numbers were 58 and 8. Small, but they're the real ones.

One thing the launch already changed: the Chronicle on the Organism page used to round every entry to the full hour, so seven events between 10:03 and 10:59 all showed as "10:00". That was a privacy decision from when there were three users a day, and at this size it just looked broken. Switched it to the minute. It still gives away no id, no name, no content, no quest, no location.

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