🏄🏻‍♂️ A short story about riding trends

3 days ago, the internet blew up with news about Apple adding the battery percentage icon back in the latest iOS 16 beta.

The design was met with a lot controversy, and it felt like everyone on Tech Twitter had something to say about the new approach. A number of designers even suggested their own alternative designs for a battery status indicator with percentage level.

Having already released a side project to track your devices' batteries from your Mac, I saw an opportunity: the new battery icon design was so hotly debated, that adding it to macOS was bound to get some attention. I knew that time wasn't on my side and I had to ship something asap.

Here's roughly how it went:

8:00 PM: come back home from an evening walk, coding juices flowing.
8:20 PM: have some UI mockups gathered from the interwebs, already coding a prototype.
9:00 PM: prototype started to look like the one in iOS 16. Order some Indian food.
9:40 PM: destroyed my order of Tikka Masala. Started integrating the prototype into Batteries.
10:45 PM: integration into Batteries is done, tested, and deployed. Schedule a post on my Twitter to tell the internet about it.
11:45 PM: get some sleep.

This morning:

5 AM: First publication picks up the story MacRumors 🤯
11:30 AM: MacGeneration picks it up/
11:44 AM: 9to5Mac picks it up.

The sales start coming in, one every few minutes, for the whole friggin' day 🔥 By the early afternoon, the app has made 20 times what it would usually make on an average day.

The lesson?

Trends are free marketing. People get excited about the latest trend, it gives them enough dopamine and adrenaline to reach the tipping point of getting excited about your product, buying it and sharing it.

Trends are also ephemeral: it's a race against the clock. But just like a wave, if you catch it at the right time, it can take you very high.