Retic

Starting a goal tree from a blank page is intimidating. So we built a way to browse goal trees other people already made and adopt one as your starting point instead. We call it a trail: pick someone's marathon plan or reading habit setup, and it becomes your own tree from day one, not a blank canvas you have to fill in alone.

This update is about the screen for submitting a trail.

The first version was one long form: pick a goal, then a wall of fields underneath it. I tried it on myself and lost track of how much was left. Category, title, description, then more fields I'd forgotten I needed to fill. No sense of progress, just scrolling.

So I split it into three steps: pick, fill in, review. A thin progress line connects them. You can click back to any completed step instead of hitting a browser back button and losing your inputs.

Small change on paper. In practice it turned a form people bailed on halfway through into one that feels like it has an end.

Two smaller decisions came out of the same pass:

- Trail links now use a short numeric address instead of a long UUID. Nobody wants to paste that into a text message.

- The trail and settings screens open as a modal over your tree instead of taking the whole page. You never lose the thing you were looking at when you clicked in.

None of this is complicated engineering. What I keep relearning: a feature living behind one screen doesn't tell you where people get stuck. You have to watch someone hit the wall themselves, or hit it yourself trying to use your own product honestly.

Retic is still in pre-registration at retic.io while I build out the flow for previewing and adopting someone else's trail into your own tree.

If you've shipped a multi-step form before: how many steps is too many before people start dropping off? Did you find that out from data, or from just watching someone use it?

Like a lot of people here, I've been running my life across two apps: Notion for goals, a habit tracker for daily execution. And for years I quietly tolerated the gap between them — I'd finish a run, check off the habit, and my "run 80km this month" goal wouldn't move an inch unless I opened a database and did the math myself.

That gap is the whole reason I'm building Retic: a goal & habit tracker that links everything in one tree — finish a habit, and your goal moves forward automatically.

I'm a solo developer, and I've been heads-down on the web app for the past few months. What's working today:

• A hierarchical goal tree — break any goal into sub-goals and tasks, as deep as you need.

• Progress that rolls up automatically — complete anything at the bottom, and every ancestor goal recalculates. No manual progress bars.

• Goals and habits measured on their own terms — some goals are yes/no, some are numeric (km, pages, reps), some are about consistency. Same for habits, including avoidance habits like "no late-night snacks."

One design decision I keep coming back to: when you fall behind pace, Retic suggests adjusting the deadline instead of telling you to grind harder. Most trackers are built around guilt; I think that's why people abandon them by February. I'd rather build the app that helps you renegotiate with yourself and keep going.

Retic is in pre-registration right now (retic.io) while I polish the core loop for launch. No revenue story yet — that chapter starts after launch, and I plan to share the numbers here as they come.

I'm curious about this crowd specifically: do you connect your daily habits to your long-term goals anywhere, or do you just trust that the dailies add up? If a tool has actually solved this for you, I'd genuinely like to hear which one and what it got right.