Deciding what to build for phase 1

For the past few days, I’ve been feeling stuck. I thought I was on the brink of completing my app, but for some reason, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. My progress was hindered by multiple factors:

  1. I began to doubt myself and my project. I questioned whether this product would indeed help users achieve a sense of calm in their day-to-day lives. I wondered if the product could offer a momentary respite amid their hectic schedules. To alleviate my doubts, I turned to research papers, most of which concluded that tracking and monitoring do help in identifying and managing stressors, with many people experiencing significant mental health benefits. I also read reviews of competing products and discovered that users greatly benefited from similar apps.

  2. I found myself stuck on defining what made my product different, only to realize there was nothing. The meditation and emotion tracker is quite a simple concept, facing stiff competition from numerous other products in the market, many of which boast even more features.

  3. My focus shifted to the potential earnings of the product, pondering whether it would ever generate revenue. This concern distracted me significantly, prompting me to explore monetization strategies prematurely, even before the product’s launch or completion.

In an attempt to overcome these obstacles, I engaged in several activities:

  1. I started learning about Large Language Models (LLMs) and completed a couple of courses from deeplearning.ai.
  2. I delved into numerous papers to solidify my conviction about the solution I was proposing.
  3. I searched for features to incorporate into the app to differentiate it from competitors.

However, these endeavours diverted me from the core value of the product, a value I had identified early on and deemed crucial.

I am creating this product for myself, to learn how to build.

I lost sight of this fundamental premise and began focusing on myriad issues—problems to be tackled eventually, but not immediately.

Having wrestled with these issues, I’ve come to learn and pay my dues. The way forward is to clearly define the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and start the development process. Challenges and solutions will emerge in due course, but my priority now is to begin building for myself and to launch the product.

The next step is to identify the features necessary for the MVP, and then, simply launch the app.

Features to added in MVP

  1. Mood Tracking
  2. Daily Reflection
  3. Mood Graph (Showing the mood information over time)
  4. Reflection Graph (Showing Daily Reflection over time)
  5. Account Creation
  6. Login/Logout (using google + email authentication)
  7. Basic Profile Creation