
From Nothing to Reaching 400 Customers
Here’s how we went from ideating to shipping our first app, Cycles.
We never thought that it would be as difficult as it was to plan, make, and ship an app. But after 1.5 years of working on it, Alec Dilanchian and myself produced Cycles, a wonderful little app that helps you build better habits. It wasn’t easy to make by any means, but surely wasn’t as difficult as others make it sound.
Here’s how it all started and how we reached 400 downloads in the first few months of release.
Going Beyond Designers
It all started while I worked with Alec at SightPlan (shoutout to the awesome team over there!). We really didn’t have much interaction as he was on the web development team and I was on the product team. He and I were in different rooms, separated by a few walls and hallways. I had an itch to meet each person on our team of 20 or so, but it felt awkward at times to just walk up and say “hey” for no reason at all except to be friendly.
Widening my personal network within the team and forming actual relationships with them was the smartest thing I could do in any workplace setting.
In the room from where I pumped out Sketch file after Sketch file, I was accompanied by some of the most talented designers, Blake Everingham and Roman Rusinov, as well as the coolest product manager, Jake Cornelius. They were the people I interacted with most from day-to-day. I didn’t just want to talk about design every day to designers. I needed to interact with developers and get their perspective on specific design scenarios or to uncover possible future roadblocks.
Eventually it became a ritual of mine. I spoke frequently to other members in different pods — the development team as well as customer support team. Through those actions I met a lot of wonderful people! This included Alec. Honestly, I was first a little timid of approaching him because of the music he listened to… It’s just screaming! How can that be enjoyable?! Looking past that, he happens to be one of the nicest and smartest people I know and I was incredibly lucky to come across him. We spoke about making something together, but didn’t find anything that stuck out for both of us. We needed to find a problem that could be solved through our combined skills.
Too Painful to Ignore
One day in the office, I felt the worst pain of my life. It shot right up my spine and I instantly dipped out of my chair. I even teared up a little and had to run to the bathroom to hide my tears because it was that painful.
Turns out, this is a common pain for folks who sit at their desk all day (the “Startup Sit” as I call it). I’m no expert, but chiropractors and doctors have informed me that poor posture while using the computer can lead to tightened muscles and a changed curvature in the spine. In order to relieve the pain, you need discipline. You need to remind yourself to be aware of your posture at all times. Obviously, I’m not capable of always being consciously aware.
Effortlessly searching for a solution, I talked it over with Alec. We both knew around that time in January of 2016 that we were determined to join forces and make something. This was absolutely it. In our first conversation, Alec was curious about it, “Hey that sounds pretty interesting”. He continued, “What if we made an app that reminds you to do a task every so often for anything you want”. I liked the sound of this. Immediately after work that day, I began sketching and wireframming potential interfaces for us.
All of a sudden, Cycles was born. Although we didn’t know what to call it at the time, that’s eventually what it became. We got along well enough to start bouncing ideas off each other which led us to start creating Cycles that night. We didn’t foresee this app taking as long as it did, but the reward of checking this off our bucket list was pretty surreal.
Releasing Cycles
Cycles took much longer than expected. This was mostly due to the unforeseeable roadblocks such as incorporating a company, acquiring the skill sets to develop and implement the sketches and mockups, getting the word out, AND still distinguishing ourselves from the competition.
You need to have a few things to launch (and maintain) a successful app.
Cut the Low Hanging Fruit
We lost a lot of sleep and spent way too much time together perfecting the interface of Cycles. We’re not by any means done, but we’re closer to providing a better experience of building habits in the simplest form possible. Our app went through at least 8 different full revisions. A tip would be to never count the first iterations as potential paths to take, but also set a realistic deadline for when to move on. Find that happy balance, and do it exceptionally well!
Smart Marketing
This one is the hardest for us to do because this was our first venture into the marketing world. We found that most of our organic growth came from links that app review websites posted. Also, it doesn’t hurt to have a landing page. On the flip side, word of mouth, combined with promotion on Facebook and Instagram surprisingly didn’t move the needle much. Reaching out to review websites or smaller blogs (or review websites and smaller blogs reaching out to you) was our biggest lead.
Brace Yourself
You need massive dedication to pursue an endeavor like this. It’s almost like having a kid. It complains and breaks down when you don’t give it enough attention (during testing). It also wears you down over time. Luckily, between Alec and I, we have the best support from friends and family.
It turns out, if you want to get serious, you really need to go all out on everything. We treated it like an obsessive side project, putting work in each day after our day jobs and school work.
Both Alec and I (and of course, Alec’s wonderful fiancé) spent part of our weeks talking together about feedback or new features. Each of us also spend time sending out marketing tweets and posts. We put a lot of labor and love into this with the hopes that it shows. We think it paid off.
After just over 2 months of Cycles being on the App Store, we’re proud to say we momentarily reached the number 2 spot on the productivity section (even beating out Things 3, Airmail, and Fantastical for a little)!

What’s Next?
In the coming weeks, we plan on publishing articles about what we discovered through the process of making Cycles.
Our goal is to share what we’ve learned building Cycles so that if you choose to build something on your own, you could succeed as much as we did — if not, more! We want to give back to everyone who has helped us live our dream of launching an app.
We’ll can start by sharing fun stories and little hacks we’ve discovered. Thank you for being a part of this incredible journey.

Be sure to check out Cycles on the App Store and let us know what you think of it!
You can follow more of what we’re up to on Twitter, Facebook, & Instagram.
