Nirow 1.0 Release Note— Our Story

We don’t build an app. We build users’ everlasting habits.

This is not a startup pitch.
What you’re going to walk through is our true story (the most realistic one) behind Nirow, including the journey to develop the app, some sharing from the co-founders, the initial idea and other interesting facts about Nirow.

The story behind “Nirow”

It’s really interesting when a lot of people came to me and asked for the meaning and the way to pronounce “Nirow”. There’s actually a long and kind of…inspiring story.

If you play Skyrim, you will know the exact phrase that describes that situation: “I used to be an adventurer like you, but then I took an arrow to the knee”

In our life, there are so many “arrows” that hit straight into our “knee”, making us unable to “walk” or “run” towards our goals again, such as a job that stops us from exercising or learning a new skill, ever again.

Nirow — inspired by the combination of “Knee” & “Arrow” — is created to solve such problem.
Nirow focuses on simplifying and automating the tracking process, so that habits and goals become easier and more fun to be completed.

Now you know how to pronounce it right? The combination of “knee” and “arrow”. It’s /’ni:rou/

The idea of developing Nirow

We had a lot of meetings to decide the concept and idea of Nirow before get to develop it. And we all see our chance to stand out in the current productivity app market, by providing Nirow with a break-though feature: the automation tracking.

Peter Vu, co-founder of Nirow, who has 5-year experience as an iOS developer shared his 2 conditions to make an extraordinary habits & goals tracking app:

• First, it must minimize the time using that app itself, so user can do other important jobs instead.
• Second, it must generate users’ motivation to create, maintain their habits and ultimately reach their goals.

“I don’t want people, before they’re tired of keeping the habit, are already tired of logging into the app and check it off” — Peter, CEO of Nirow

And we has successfully executed this idea! Beside the traditional tap-to-complete tracking, Nirow can automatically track user habits & goals by connecting to daily services: Apple Health, Fitbit, RescueTime and Location.

For example, set your goal to take 3000 steps a day, with the connection to Apple Health, it will automatically count the steps, remind and reward you when 3000 steps have been completed. Convenient, right?

Another core value of Nirow is the special care for user’s well-being. Again, with the connection to Apple and RescueTime. We enable users to add cards to track their health, nutrition and productivity.

These two are the initial ideas when we developed this app. If you’d like to know more features, see us on Appstore.

The wisdom in design

The success of our previous app — Habitify must thank to the clean and focused interface with the white — blue theme color. About 80 percent of the positive reviews we received focus on aesthetic appeal.

With Nirow, we intend to keep up with this great job. But this time, we cover Nirow with white — green theme color.

Son Min, co-founder of Nirow, who has 5-year experience as UI/UX designer and sees the world through rose-colored glasses, shares his perspectives:

Clean and Convenient. That’s what users need.

“ I chose the white-blue theme for Habitify to rouse the feeling of secured and a bit serious. With Nirow, we focus on the well-being of the users, so I choose the white-green theme, together with illustrated, round images to bring them healthy and comfortable experience.

Users — our priority, need a clean and focused interface so that they can easily track the progress and see their improvement day by day. Eventually, they will feel extremely happy when the completion rate is going up.

So I decided to present all habits and goals in one dashboard, tapping each to see the progress. In the Impact tab, I use “Card” templates to make things focused and easy to understand”.

About our team

First, our company, Unstatic Co, Ltd (founded in 2016) with the message “Better you, better world” has successfully launched Habitify — an analytics-based tracker — and received a lot of attention from app community.

Two years later, in Jan 2018, Nirow is born. This “child” inherits the best feature of its forerunner and even more.

You might be surprised to know that our team has only 4 members: 2 co-founders (1 developer, 1 designer) and 2 enthusiastic (quite abnormal) marketers (I’m one of the two). The fantastic four, huh? We’ve been doing great in the past 2 months and now bring you the most completed Nirow.

Of course, every startup faces with challenges

Well…There were a lot of challenges that we have to face with when developing Nirow. I guess all starters would feel the same.

The biggest challenge was the Time management. We intended to complete the app in 2 months to be on time for the New Year event (when people are encouraged to set the goals or create new habits). But it turned out not that easy.

Due to limited manpower and technical capacity, we have to put off 15 days to the launch. Thanks to the early adopters for their patience and support.

The first version of has been released, with so much excitement of our team, but we also feel our app is not up to perfection. Features may perform imperfectly sometimes. But we believe the app would work smoothly after 2 updates.

If you have any feedback for our team, feel free to contact us via any of these channels:
Facebook: https://facebook.com/nirowapp
Twitter: https://twitter.com/nirowapp
Website: https://nirow.me
Or feel free to send your feedback to contact@nirow.me