I challenged myself to build and launch a daily todo list app in 12 hours

The Why

I endlessly polish products I work on.

While that makes my products stand out it’s also a big issue when wanting to launch fast.

To get better at “getting things done” I gave myself 12 hours to build and publish a working MacOS tray bar app.

The What

I decided to build a daily todo app to gather the most important things to work on for the day.

It’s a clear scope and it’s something I very much needed myself.

The How

Didn’t research the market, just wanted to get started and get something done. Otherwise I would’ve ended up procrastinating too much about this being the right path to take. Just start building.

I choose Electron to build it with, as I know JavaScript.

A good friend suggested the name “Hotlist”, this sounded fine and so I just went with it, can always change it later.

I had to learn how to sign and notarize a MacOS apps to make it work on Ventura, the first version just didn’t run. Took a while to figure this out.

Had to quit endlessly tweaking icons, layout and other design elements. This was so difficult.

Decided not to add storage, all items were lost on reload of the app. I figured that would be fine for a daily todo list.

No custom app icon, just the electron default icon, oof 😅

The Result

I ran the challenge a week ago on Thursday and managed to publish a “working” version by the end of the workday 🎉

The end result functioned quite well, and users are already very positive about it. Who knows maybe it’s of use to you to make better progress on your side project.

Of the 50+ downloads so far not one customer has mentioned the app icon, hah!

It’s a free app for now but it still made a hearth warming $90 in pay-why-you-want purchases so far.

You can get it here: https://pqina.nl/hotlist