Recallity

Hi all, I'm David. I put my first app on the App Store at the end of July. Solo, no team. It's a study app, which I know is not a category anyone was asking for more of.

The reason I built it is a bit embarrassing.

Any time I had something big to study for I'd do the identical thing. Start at page one, highlight, re-read, make notes that looked great. Three hours later I'd feel like I'd done real work. And I had, sort of. I'd just done it on the parts I already half-knew, because those were the parts that were pleasant to read. The stuff I'd skipped stayed skipped the whole time.

This caught up with me in my first year at university. There was one module I was sure I had under control. I'd been through the slides more times than anyone I knew and I walked into that exam calmer than my friends did. Then I turned the paper over and a big chunk of it was on material I recognised but had never once tried to actually do anything with. I could have told you which lecture it came from. I couldn't answer the question. I sat there for a while genuinely confused about how both of those could be true at the same time.

What bothered me afterwards wasn't that I hadn't studied. It's that I had no way to tell I was studying the wrong things. Reading something you know and reading something you've never absorbed feel completely identical while you're doing it.

I did look for an app first. They all work the same way: you make the cards, it quizzes you on your cards. But you can only put something on a card if you already know it exists. Everything I was avoiding was invisible to me by definition, so it never made it onto a card, and the app happily showed me 100% every day.

So I built it backwards. It asks you to dump what you remember first, before it gives you anything. Messy, your own words. Then it compares that against your actual material and shows you where the two don't line up.

First time I ran it on my own notes there were three topics in the "you didn't mention this at all" column that I'd have sworn I understood. I hadn't skipped them on purpose. I just couldn't see them. That was when I decided to build the real thing instead of leaving it as a weekend script.

The part I keep going in circles on:

That dump is the whole point and it's also friction. I'm asking someone who sat down to study to first type out what they remember, before they get anything back. The people who push through it get the payoff. Plenty take one look and don't want to.

Can't work out if that's an onboarding problem I haven't solved, or if it's just what the thing costs and I should stop trying to sand it down.

If you've built something where the valuable step is also the annoying step, what did you do? Make it easier, or get better at explaining why it's worth doing?