Ten months ago I decided to build a tiny side-project that should have taken just a few weeks. It isn't the first time I grossly underestimated my own capacity and it won't be the last, but that's not that made the whole experience terrifying.
As many others I had this beautiful dream in my mind that if I'll just apply apply all my umphteen years of practical knowledge I'll be able to make just about anything happen over time.
I don't think I fully realised how much more there is to building a product than just development and how paralyzing being a sole developer can be.
And worst of all? I can't seem to let go of the idea no matter what, so I'm far from giving up, but let's save the future for later. Today I'd like to share with you the bone chilling story of a tiny home management app I started.
"Find a problem to solve"
Something that I took embarassingly long time to figure out is that chore management is just about the worst possible problem one can try and solve with an app. Chore management apps are downloaded in mass and abandoned in an instant for one reason: when you have a single responsible home manager - they become yet another thing to manage for them.
The same happened with my beloved Hounty: while a home cleaning photo-gallery worked for me - my kids used it once and never touched again.
"Keep iterating"
Between the first, currently released, fully offline version and the one in the making I built at least three more:
- Earn and burn family points: kids were gaming the system with the artisanry of a penetration tester
- Clean together: apparently cleaning together for them meant that I clean and they wander off doing something else
- Visual cleaning todo list: they do not differentiate between me nagging them remotely or in person and do not do what I asked them to do
Some things worked, for example once I was sitting at a table across a sofa. Sofa was covered in toys and snacks. I opened my mouth to bark at my daughter "You left a mess again! Go clean it up right now!", but I remembered an article I read that suggested that reframing the expectation on oneself could help with habit forming. So instead I started to rub my eyes and said: "Oh, you're not gonna believe it! I'm so sleepy - I see things that aren't there! I know you're a very tidy person and there's no way you'd left sofa in this state. So I'll just rob my eyes for a bit and hope it'll pass". As expected, she giggled and quickly cleaned up everything.
One of my proudest parenting moments, that's for sure. Did it solve the problem for good? God, no! I attempted to do the same thing a few more times and she ignored it entirely.
"Know when to pivot"
Clearly, it wasn't working at all, but I was using my own app and a few of my friends enjoyed it too. Maybe, just maybe I should pivot towards adults? Clearly the dopamine hit adults were getting from seeing before and after transformations by their own hands wasn't cutting it for kids.
I did ask my kids more than once what makes cleaning hard for them and the answers varied between "It's boring" to "I don't know where to start" and the fated "I don't see any mess" that started this whole thing for me.
I spoke to several people (thanks to "The Mom Test" I got a lot more successful in conducting user research) and I learned that there's a hundred of different problems adults face with cleaning: from decision fatigue to lack of knowledge to sticking to routines.
How can I possible solve all of them with one app?!
And even if I would, how would I market it and to whom?
(Re)-Positioning
When I'm lost I either read or write and since I have had very limited knowledge in marketing or product positioning I found a book that resonated with me. "Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning so Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It" brought a few new and interesting perspectives and eventually I was able to describe what I built in a way that even LLM could deduct what the app does from a few words.
I asked:
"Describe the features that a "home cleaning gallery app" would have please"
And Gemini said:
That's a great idea! A "Home Cleaning Gallery App" sounds like a helpful tool for visualization and motivation.
Here are the key features and functionalities such an app would likely include, organized by category:
📸 Core Gallery & Visualization Features
These features focus on the main purpose of the app: managing visual evidence of cleaning.
Before & After Albums:
The ability to easily pair a photo of a messy area ("Before") with a photo of the cleaned area ("After").
A side-by-side or swipe-to-reveal comparison view to dramatically showcase the results.
Room/Area Tagging:
Allow users to tag photos with the specific room (e.g., Kitchen, Bathroom 1, Kids' Playroom) or area (e.g., Under the sink, Pantry).
Filter/Search Functionality to view all photos for a specific room.
Time & Date Stamping:
Automatically record the date and time a photo was taken to track cleaning frequency and effort.
Detailed Photo Captioning:
Space to add notes describing what was done (e.g., "Deep clean of grout," "Organized spices").
📋 Task & Tracking Features
These features connect the visual evidence to the actual cleaning process.
Cleaning Checklist Integration:
Allow users to link photos to specific items on their cleaning checklist (e.g., "After" photo confirms the Cleaning the fridge task is complete).
Task History/Log: Review a historical list of all cleaning tasks, complete with their associated "After" photos.
Goal & Challenge Setting:
Set personal cleaning goals (e.g., "Clean every room once a week"). The app uses the "After" photos as confirmation of completion.
Cleaning Routine Templates:
Pre-set weekly, monthly, or seasonal cleaning routines that users can follow, checking off and photographing tasks as they go.
⭐ Motivation & Sharing Features
These features make the app engaging and provide a sense of accomplishment.
"Brag Board" or "Success Gallery":
A dedicated section to celebrate the best "After" photos, perhaps automatically generating a montage of the past week's accomplishments.
Gamification/Badges:
Award badges for milestones (e.g., Bathroom Master for 10 bathroom cleaning galleries, Consistency King for a streak of weekly cleaning).
Sharing Functionality:
Easy option to share the impressive "Before & After" comparisons to social media or messaging apps (perhaps with a watermark/branded frame).
"Inspiration Feed" (Optional):
A feed of user-submitted (or curated professional) cleaning photos/tips to inspire users and showcase what's achievable.
🛠️ Utility & Settings Features
These features focus on the practical use of the app.
Photo Storage Optimization:
A way to store the high volume of photos without clogging the user's main camera roll (cloud storage or dedicated in-app storage).
Secure Backup & Sync:
Cloud backup to ensure cleaning history and photos aren't lost when switching devices.
Privacy Controls:
Options to make sure photos aren't accidentally shared or visible outside of the app.
Would you like me to elaborate on one of these features, such as the Before & After Albums, or think about the user flow for creating a new cleaning entry?
So pretty much everything I had on my roadmap! Great success! Perfect positioning! I even made cute stickers:
But what kind of problem does a home cleaning photo gallery solve?
Painkillers vs Vitamins
Despite gaining some traction with the redesigned and updated website, I still felt that something is not right. There were no sales to the one-time-paid app, which was to be expected given that I placed zero effort to market it, but I just wasn't comfortable with the app anymore.
It was working, in fact the approach was so effective - I learned how to clean up without it. I could now take all the images in my head and get the same result. And if I wasn't using it anymore, who would?
On top of that, I learned about "painkillers and vitamins" framework and of course my beloved Hounty fell into the latter category. I got really dissaponted: not only the market was crowded with high-churn apps - the problem I was desperate to solve wasn't painful enough to warrant paying for the solution.
I spent about a week feeling sorry for myself and making no progress, until I looked a bit deeper into that framework. It didn't make sense: my own phone was full of "vitamin" apps that were profitable.
Turns out selling a "vitamin" is not nessesarily harder than selling a "painkiller", but it requires a very different way of marketing: focused on building a brand and a community to earn enough trust from potential users to show them the long term effects of their investment.
Building a brand
Shiny sticker on my phone case was haunting me every time I would do anything else but working on Hounty. Of course, I resisted for as long as I can: I rebuilt my personal website, wrote a few articles, built a few tiny apps, but untimately I couldn't put it off anymore.
Despite of all of the challenges Hounty threw at me - I couldn't let go of it. Tiny cute little bugger kept on popping up in my head like a ghost he is.
And so I sat and outlined what Hounty meant for me and what kind of a brand it would be and what kind of company would Hounty be:
Bold. Open. Clean.
Bold choices, ambitious goals, infectious energy. We reach for the stars, fall hard and fast and celebrate our learnings as big as our successes. We do not wait for a permission, we build and iterate fast. We take ownership of problems and find solutions regardless of the area. We are everywhere and do everything we can to achieve our shared goal.
Open communication, open discussions, high trust environment. We show up as we are - warts and all - and stand tall. We accept that mistakes are inevitable and share our learnings openly. We say what we mean and we mean what we say - loud and clear, to the best of our abilities.
Clean interface, clean architecture, clear policies, clear rules and flat structure - our lines are clear and boring, our politics are built on mutual respect and empathy. We clean up when things get messy - as they always do - and try to do better than the last time.
I even generated a Hounty anthem in Suno! Because why not?!
SoMe
Where does one do branding nowadays if you have zero budget? Social media!
I started consistently posting on TikTok (apparently #CleanTok is a thing) and I'm happy to report that I have no idea what I'm doing, but I'm getting a dozen of likes on each post, so I am hopeful.
Instagram doesn't seem to get any reaction, so I paused posting there till I have better ideas.
In general I'm not a big fan of social media, so it's been a struggle to learn how to do it and, most importantly, how to do so without sacrificing my values.
One app is not enough
As I was testing different approaches and iterating on how I present Hounty to the world, I realised that I can never build an app that would solve all the problems with housework and would continiously keep solving the new ones that would come in their stead.
But what if I would build many apps: one for each problem, somehow connected between themselves. Kinda like microservices, but microapps? That might just work yet.
The concept of microapps is not new and have been used to connect multiple corporate internal tools, but there they were joined together by a super-app.
The main goal of Hounty is to make house work less overwhelming, so you could imagine how great a super-dashboard app would work out for that, right?
But what if I don't build a superapp at all? What if I connect the apps in a way Google has been doing for years - with one account?
If you judge the idea's worth based on how fast I can execute on it - then this one was a great one: I updated hounty.app in an evening, everything was making sense and I was having fun again!
And when I was done - I got really really scared.
The Most Terrifying Thing
I had no excuse anymore, the vision, the story, all of my ideas there were now at the open. Do you know what happens when you put your art out there? People would see it.
And it's terrifying. Despite of all the research and gut feeling, despite of execution I'm almost-not-ashamed of, what happens next is no longer within my control.
You could ask: what's the worst that could happen, Val? Someone won't like it, so what?
And I would have to admit that it's not the reaction I'm afraid of. I am afraid that I won't get any reaction or lukewarm at best - data I won't be able to iterate on.
You made far in this point and by now you know enough to judge Hounty and my ideas. If you feel up for it, check hounty.app and either sign-up for beta or share your unfiltered thoughts in the comments.
Tell me all the ways it doesn't make sense, all the reasons why it wouldn't work, because, as scary as it is - I really want to give Hounty my best try.
Top comments (1)
Looking forward to the next article. Hopefully, with more user insights.