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I am scared to tell you about my app and the process of building it, but here we go

Hey folks,

I am a long time lurker and I am pretty damn scared to open up here.
But I will force myself into it.

For context: I am working as a self-taught it infrastructure guy since ~4 years. So Kuberenetes, cloud native things and slowly learning some Golang and python at the job as well.
I would not consider myself as a developer yet.

For some reason I always wanted to build my own thing, an app as they say today.
I started so many courses you would not believe it, but after the course I was never dangerous enough to build something on my own. Always got stuck and lost motivation.

And I tell you another secret of mine: I hate building todo apps, puzzles or solve some math problems. And the math thing, yeah done that for my engineering degree (not it related) a frickin lot.
This just bores me to the death.😪

That's why I never got along to build my own thing yet.

That changed in January. A non technical friend of mine did build a nice looking app with flutter for Android and iOS. He also did sent me his login credentials to the course he was taking.
He was directly asking about my launch date 😅
I just used the course to get an overview of syntax and basic things.
After that I decided to look for a mentor who could unblock me when I get stuck and started my own thing.
No todo apps for me anymore!

My own thing:

It is still pretty early prototype but I haven an app running on my phone. I can list, add and delete entries which are stored in Google firebase.

What does it do?
Right now it's just listing exercises. Yes, another fitness app. An already competitive market.

This fact would have stopped me a few years ago. But I do not care today, since my goal is to learn the software development process and as a bonus start to enjoy it.

What problem does it solve?
My own problem. Recovery from a shoulder surgery.

There is no official free to use database of exercises you can browse to find exercises which might help you to fix your condition.
Do not get me wrong, please go to doctors, physio therapist and others. They will almost always know better than you.
But I could never remember all the exercise they were showing and telling me. And especially the tipps they mention when doing the exercises.

So I "just" created a simple list (stored in firebase) and a local database where I can store local images and videos mapped to the exercises (firebase). These will be taken by the therapist when I do my exercise.
That way I am able to look that up later.

And after sitting this I feel a little scared:

Will someone steal my idea?
Is it worth talking about my struggles?
Do you guys care and should I build something like this in the open?
Could I make money out of this?
How much time and money will this cost?
Are others interested in this?
Would someone pay for this?
How do I get to an extensive good list with correct content?
Should I create an email list for interested people?

And so many more things in my head are floating around.

If you read everything, thank you very much. Maybe you can answer my questions.
Anyway, I wish all of you a pleasant rest of your day!

PS: the app is not yet available in app stores, therefore no link yet.

  1. 2

    Hi Andrej, CancerAid which featured on Shark Tank did something similar for cancer treatment patients - I believe multi-millions in revenue now. As you identified, a similar problem exists for physio (and likely exists for any health domain where patients need to be reminded to do things and/or be provided a lot of info).
    I suspect the much better buyer/customer is the health provider and not the patient themselves but definitely a viable business. All the best!

    1. 1

      Interesting, thanks for mentioning cancer aid. Will definitely look into their story.

      I suspect the much better buyer/customer is the health provider and not the patient themselves but definitely a viable business. All the best!

      In general I would agree with you but it also depends on what you would like to do with your time.
      I certainly do not want to think about taking care of sensitive patient and medical staff data. That will have really high requirements everywhere, especially here in Germany.

      To keep it simple I will focus on people like myself. As stated by vladcalin: I will focus on building and launching first.

  2. 1

    First step is to just launch. Not everything is supposed to make money. You can build things only for the sake of building, to advance your skills and build a more impressive portofolio (which in time will earn you more money). So to some degree, even if something doesn't make money directly, it can help you earn more long term.

    Btw " I am working as a self-taught it infrastructure guy since ~4 years" sounds like you were doing infrastructure things since you were 4 years old XD Which would be very impressive, but I suppose you meant to say "for ~4 years" instead?

    1. 1

      Thanks for the kind reply.
      I will continue to work on this app no matter what. I just wanted to show what kind of struggles I have at the earliest beginning which is really not important.
      Just build and launch is important.

      It is getting to the state where the development process is kind of fun actually. Learning is set as my main goal currently I am happy with that now.

      Also, I do not want to force monetization. That sometimes makes the product bad in my opinion.
      I would like to learn to integrate monetization into an app, but not that early in.

      Btw " I am working as a self-taught it infrastructure guy since ~4 years" sounds like you were doing infrastructure things since you were 4 years old XD Which would be very impressive, but I suppose you meant to say "for ~4 years" instead?

      Ha, here we see that I am not a native English speaker ;-)
      It is definitely for 4 years then, thanks for letting me know!

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