I just released an app. To the App Store. It’s there, live and asking to be bought.

It’s called Shadowtrainer. It’s an app for your shadow boxing session.

Why?

Around this time last year, I had two significant life events. 1, I had COVID. 2, my favorite boxing gym closed down (RIP Wreck Room).

I had a particularly nasty variant with a long recovery period so I couldn’t workout for a while. To distract myself from my decaying body, I focused on learning mobile development.

Then Wreck Room announced that they were going to close shop. My time there has basically defined my 30s and I can’t imagine what type of person I would have been if I hadn’t started getting hit in the face a few times. I wanted to honor that somehow.

So I started making an app about my favorite part of boxing training: shadow boxing.

Development is hell

My initial goal was simple: make a simple boxing round timer and publish it in the app store.

I started mid-June, calculating the time I will be sedentary and not being a productive member of society, I thought I was going to publish by August. In the next couple of months, I was so productive learning a new framework, adopting a new workflow and heavily using ChatGPT to augment my knowledge gap.

It was only in September that I was healthy enough to test the app in my first workout session. And it sucked. It didn’t run in the background, the audio cues were too loud and would cut the music, and a lot of other UI issues. Bugs you wouldn’t consider when you’re just building at a desk.

During this time, I was getting into Product Management, and wanting to apply what I’m learning, I decided to turn my project into a “product”, ie. charge money for it.

In October I was showing it to friends and coworkers. It was already at a usable state that I regularly use it for my workouts. Then one day, while thinking of ways to improve the experience, I decided to burn everything to the ground and start over with a redesign. I estimated it would take me the rest of the year and launch in the beginning of 2024.

But December came and I had to do this hackathon thing at work that ate a lot of my free time. So I slipped a bit. Then 2024 came and the company had a re-org and it was a stressful period for everyone. I forgot about the release target.

After things settled down, I realised I have this unfinished thing that just needs a little bit more effort to polish off. So I booked 3 days of PTO to get it over the line.

That was 3 weeks ago.

What now?

I think I’ve achieved my initial goal. But now I think putting an app in the app store is the easy part. Making people pay for it is the real challenge.

I have a lot of ideas on how this app evolves and how it fits in the fitness apps universe I want to ultimately build. So I guess I have to try to be an internet personality again.