I stopped thinking about recovery apps as trackers.

And started thinking about them as decision-making tools.

When I first started building Sobrica, I thought the most important thing was helping people track their sobriety.

Streaks.

Milestones.

Days without nicotine or alcohol.

Then I started spending time in recovery communities on Reddit and Quora.

One thing kept coming up.

People rarely talked about their streak.

They talked about the moment they almost broke it.

The drive home after work.

The coffee that triggered a craving.

The stressful phone call.

The weekend with friends.

It made me wonder if we've been optimizing for the wrong thing.

Maybe the value of a recovery app isn't how well it tracks your progress.

Maybe it's whether it helps you make one better decision during the 5 minutes when you're most likely to relapse.

That's changed how I'm thinking about Sobrica.

I'm spending less time asking, "What feature should we add?"

And more time asking, "What does someone actually need during their hardest five minutes?"

For anyone building products in health, productivity, or even SaaS:

Have you ever realized you were optimizing the wrong metric? What changed your mind?