WorkBuddy

WorkBuddy is an AI-powered work journal for the self-employed and solo workers. You journal your workday in five prompts, plan for tomorrow, and every Sunday night you get an AI-generated summary of your week. Patterns you missed, wins worth celebrating, honest reflection on what was hard. I'm building it solo alongside client work and launching mid-August.

Pricing a product you built alone is uncomfortable in a specific way. There is no one to sanity-check you. No team to pressure-test the number. Just you, a blank doc, and the quiet suspicion that whatever you pick will be wrong.

I landed on $12/month or $120/year. One plan. Everything included. I'm happy with it now. Getting there took longer than I'd like to admit.

The free trial decision was harder.

I started with 7 days. It felt standard. Enough time to try the product, form an opinion, decide if it's worth paying for. Except WorkBuddy has a problem with 7 days.

The flagship feature is a weekly AI summary, generated every Sunday from your journal entries. It's the whole point. It's what makes the journaling worth doing. And with a 7-day trial, a user who signs up on a Saturday sees nothing on Sunday. Then, if they don't convert before the next Sunday, they never see it at all before getting locked out.

I was asking people to pay for a feature they'd never experienced. That's not a trial. That's just hoping they trust me.

So I moved to 14 days. Two Sundays guaranteed. At least one full week of journaling with a summary waiting at the end of it. That's what the product actually needs to make its case.

The trade-off is obvious: longer trial, slower conversion signal, higher chance someone journals for two weeks and decides it's not for them. I made peace with that. A user who experiences the summary and still doesn't convert is useful information. A user who churns before they ever see it is just a gap in the funnel.

No credit card required. Data preserved even after lockout. If someone pays a month later, they pick up exactly where they left off.

Launching mid-August. Beta access closes soon. Check it out.

A few weeks into beta and I'm sitting with an uncomfortable question: am I building something people actually want, or am I just building?

I built WorkBuddy because I felt the problem myself. Days blurring into each other. Switching between clients and projects and never really knowing at the end of the week if I moved forward or just stayed busy. I wanted something that would hand me back my week and tell me honestly what happened.

So I built it. A work journal for people who work without structure. Five prompts a day. Every Sunday night, an AI summary in your inbox: patterns you missed, wins worth naming, honest reflection on what was hard.

A few people signed up for beta. Most of them are people who know me and want to support me. That's kind, but it's not the feedback I need. I need to hear from people who have the problem, not people who have my back.

So here's what I'm offering: two weeks of free access. No credit card, no obligation to continue, no pitch at the end. Use it like you actually would. At the end of week two, if you can tell me what you found, a quick call, an email, or even a comment here, that's all I'm asking.

I'm genuinely trying to figure out:

1. Does journaling your workday feel like something you'd actually do, or does it feel like one more thing on an already full plate?

2. Is the weekly summary the part that would make it worth it, or does something else need to come first?

3. What would make you open the app without a reminder nudging you?

If any of this resonates, please do request beta access at useworkbuddy.com or drop a comment here and I'll approve you directly.

Distribution is hard when you are building a vitamin.

WorkBuddy is a work journal with AI summaries. It is not a painkiller. Nobody wakes up at 2 AM sweating because they forgot to reflect on their week. The pain is quieter than that. It is the slow drift. The weeks that blur together. The Sunday evening feeling that you were busy but cannot quite say what moved forward.

That kind of pain is real, but it does not make someone Google "work journal app." Which means most lead gen playbooks do not apply to me.

So I started thinking about Reddit. My ICP, solopreneurs, freelancers, indie hackers, are on there. They complain there. They ask for recommendations there. If I could find the threads where my people are showing up and talking about the problem WorkBuddy solves, I could at least start listening before I start pitching.

Setting up F5Bot

F5Bot is a free tool that emails you whenever your chosen keywords appear in new Reddit posts or comments. Simple, no frills, exactly what I needed to start.

I set it up with a focused keyword list about a week ago. The theory was solid. Watch for a week, see what comes up, then decide if the keywords need expanding.

The reality was more humbling.

Most of what came back was noise. "Work journal" as a keyword pulled in shadow work journals, someone mentioning a physical notebook in a bag, a comment in Tagalog. Clearly not my ICP. A few other keywords I tested were even further off. Completely out of context.

But there was some real signal in there too.

One thread, "Which Productivity Apps Have You Actually Stuck With Long Term?", had someone mention an iPhone app called Briefly. Daily prompts, weekly AI summary. That is essentially WorkBuddy's core loop. Good to know it exists. Also good to see someone recommending it unprompted, because it confirms the behaviour I am building for is real.

The bigger problem

The challenge is not really F5Bot. F5Bot is doing what it is supposed to do.

The challenge is that there is no generic problem statement I can monitor for. Someone who needs WorkBuddy is not searching "work journal app." They are posting about feeling scattered, or asking how to stay accountable without a manager, or wondering why their weeks feel full but unproductive. The pain shows up in many different forms, none of them tidy enough for a keyword alert.

Most lead gen tools assume you know what your customer is searching for. When you are building a vitamin, you do not always get that clarity. The person who needs WorkBuddy most might not even know they need it yet.

That is the wall I am currently looking at.

Where I am now

Beta is live. F5Bot is running. I am treating this as week one of a longer experiment in finding my people, not a quick fix.

If you have built something in the vitamin category, something that improves how people work or think rather than solving a crisis, I would love to know how you found your ICP. Especially on Reddit, but not limited to it.

What actually worked for you?

A few weeks into beta and I have one actively journaling user out of five who signed up.

I'm not embarrassed to say that. It's the reality, and pretending otherwise helps no one.

What I can't figure out is whether journaling is genuinely hard to make a habit, or whether my beta users were mostly friends and family doing me a favour. Probably both. But that distinction matters a lot for what I do next.

WorkBuddy is a work journal for people who work alone. Five prompts at the end of your day, and every Sunday night an AI summary of your week, patterns you missed, what drained you, what moved the needle. The idea came from my own frustration of ending busy days with no sense of whether any of it actually mattered.

The problem felt real to me. Still does. But I'm starting to wonder if the people who feel it strongly enough to actually do something about it are harder to find than I assumed.

So I have one honest question for anyone who works solo:

Do you reflect on your work at all? Not a task list, not time tracking. Actually stepping back and asking whether you spent your week on the right things. And if you don't, is it because you don't see the value, or because you just never get around to it?

Brutal honesty welcome.

I built a tool to stop lying to myself about how I work.

I've always been someone who juggles too many things at once. Client projects, side projects, ideas that feel urgent at 11 PM. My task list has never been short, and for a long time I thought the solution was just better prioritization. So I'd sit down, write everything out, tag tasks by priority, mark the revenue-generating ones, strike off the rest, and feel good about it for exactly a few days. Then I'd drift again. Back to working on things that felt productive but didn't really matter.

What I actually needed wasn't a better task list. I needed something to pull me back when I drifted. Something that would make me look at how I was spending my time and ask honestly: is this moving anything forward?

I time track my work. Have done for years. But I never looked at the reports unless a client needed an invoice. The data was there. The reflection never happened. That gap is what WorkBuddy is trying to close.

The journey to actually building it

WorkBuddy didn't start in February 2026. It started much earlier, as a capstone project in a Python developer program I joined. I interviewed users, validated the idea, got a green signal, and started building. FastAPI, Jinja templates, then htmx when I realized I needed a reactive UI, then Vue.js when htmx felt limiting. I made progress, then got a client project and WorkBuddy went to the backbench.

Over the next stretch I tried to rebuild it in WeWeb as I moved deeply into the world of Low code. Then considered Flutterflow for a mobile app. Neither took off. Life and client work kept pulling me back.

Finally in February this year I decided to get serious. I had Figma designs sitting from much earlier. I used those as the base, and with Claude Code and the original tech stack FastAPI, Vue.js, PostgreSQL, I built it properly and got it to beta.

That journey probably sounds messy. It was. But I don't think I'd have built the right thing if I'd rushed it the first time.

Where I am now

Beta is live. 25+ people signed up for the waitlist. Five actually signed up to the product. One is actively using it.

I'll be honest about what that tells me, because sugarcoating it would defeat the purpose of building in public.

Distribution and marketing are not my core strengths. I've built solid products before, computer vision solutions that ran at national conferences, client projects across low code and beyond. Building is not the hard part. Getting the right people to show up and stick around is.

The most surprising, and honestly a little annoying, thing I've learned in beta is how hard people find it to sit down and journal consistently. I assumed that once someone signed up, the problem was solved. Turns out signing up and actually doing the thing are two very different decisions. The users who are screaming this problem, who feel it the way I felt it, are the ones who will journal. The rest I can't force fit. That's the clearest thing beta has taught me so far.

Why I'm still building it

I'm not chasing a unicorn. I want WorkBuddy to become a profitable, sustainable product. Something that earns real revenue, ideally with enough autonomy that it runs without me having to be everywhere at once.

But right now the goal is simpler: find the people who genuinely need this, and build something that earns their trust every Sunday night when their weekly summary lands.

If you work alone and you recognize that drift I described, I'd love to hear how you currently make sense of your days. And if you want to try WorkBuddy, beta is open.