tinythoughts
A sentence-a-day journal. Because keeping a journal is hard.
Today, I launched the tinythoughts mobile on Product Hunt!
I learned a few things, pre-launch (I will make another post with post-launch reflections), but the number one thing I learned is: your network is key. If you don't have a mailing list of subscribers already, it's critical to have people prepared to help you promote. I am lucky that my husband, friends, and coworkers all came together to support me.
Check it out now in the Google Play Store! https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.tinythoughts
I learned a lot during this process. Here are some key takeaways:
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I used React Native so that I could program in javascript, because that's what I'm comfortable with. There wound up being a lot less shared code between native and web than I would have liked. I think I probably could have done better about architecting the code with the idea of it being shareable between native and web.
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Microsoft App Center makes building and distributing native apps so much easier. There are a lot of secrets to manage. Automating that process was definitely worth the two minutes it took to set up App Center.
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That said, it's worth the effort to manage your own versioning. react-native-version is a package that makes it easy to use your package.json version as the version for both Android and iOS apps. App Center has a toggle to automatically bump the build version for you, but, ultimately, managing it myself was better.
Anyway, check out the link to tinythoughts below, and let me know what you think! The iOS version should be coming out soon.
I am using a sentiment analysis library to automatically detect the mood (positive or negative) of a post. I added the tags #positive-mood and #negative-mood for users to be able to filter their posts. I also used d3 to create a neat-looking mood heatmap calendar.
I also added AnnounceKit so I can more easily communicate new features to users! It was very easy to work with.
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Sentiment analysis is my secret obsession, haha. A really cool feature in your app!
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Thanks! I am still trying to think of cool ways to display that information. Are there any particular sentiment metrics you are interested in?
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Hmm, my previous projects focused more on intention (with mood being a part of it) based on linguistic analysis. As you expand your project, you can possibly try to pinpoint more narrow "moods" like contemplative, for example.
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Congrats!
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Thank you! :)
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I built out the MVP by myself using firebase and vue-cli.
I learned that there is a market for my product! I also learned that it really helps to have influential people tweet your ProductHunt launch, so reach out to people ahead of time and time your launch accordingly.
- Jess
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Very nice work. I always tell people consistency is key in building habits. Journaling can be tough when you feel you have to say everything you did in the day and go into detail. Just having to write one sentence can be a great way to get you in the habit of reflecting.
Kudos to you.
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Thank you! Yeah, I think journaling can be overwhelming for a lot of people (myself included!). I think having the prompts and character count helps me focus on what is important.
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