Making Strides: Lessons Learned Building the App of My Dreams

After almost 3 years of exhausting (and exhilarating) work making an app to make tracking Goals & Habits easier and more flexible, I’m proud to say that Strides has been downloaded over 53,000 times in 116 countries!

If you’re thinking of building an app/software company, or if you just want the juicy details and data on mine, this collection will be a behind-the-scenes look at a software company that’s been through a lot, so here goes:

In 2011, I wanted to build an awesome app, and productivity was a huge passion of mine, so I set out to make something that would make being productive easier…with more flexibility than we’ve ever had before.

Almost 3 years later, my vision is finally coming to life, and though we have a ton of work left to do, I’m so happy with the results so far!

Here’s the quick recap:

1. I’m a Product Manager with a focus on UX, so I hired a developer.
2. Hiring the right one was tough, but I picked the best one I could find.
3. It took them 16 months to ship v1.0 (contract: 3 months) and they charged me extra, even though we cut 9 line items from the release.
4. I learned a lot from the experience about prototyping to help developers see the vision and set realistic expectations for the timeline and quotes.
5. The first version was nothing to write home about, but I quickly found a new developer and we shipped v2.0 in less than 5 months.
6. We cranked out 4 more updates in the following 4 months, but when the time came to bring it to iPad & Web, he had to move on.
7. So, I hired a new developer to get us to v3.0 in May 2014, and we’ve been working extremely hard to bring it to life.
8. Thankfully, we’ve pushed past the hardest parts of refactoring everything for syncing, and our beta is almost ready (feel free to sign up here).

So, here we are. In the next couple months, we’ll go from just an iPhone app to: iPhone, iPad & Web (responsive and super fast), with a business model that is more sustainable.

More on that in the next article…if you enjoyed this, follow me or the Making Strides collection to keep getting a behind-the-scenes view of our failures and successes building a software company.