A New Direction

For anyone keeping track, it's been a while since my last post (some major, very positive, events happened that I was focusing on). Since then, I have decided to change direction with the app a bit. Here are some of the things that have come to mind:

First, I decided to switch to building a different app (at least for now). After ~1.5 years of building and ~2-3 months of promoting, the app, Left Off, hasn't gained much traction. This could be due to a number of reasons, but I think one of the main ones is that it doesn't quite solve a problem that people have. I may go deeper into that topic in a future blog, but in short, Left Off still has the potential to do well, but would need some more work.

At first I considered building something for Monday.com users. I thought about this since I could potentially reach a more niche audience, among other reasons. Upon returning to app development, I ultimately wasn't feeling the Monday.com route too much, at least right now. I've learned so much about app development and worked hard to get production in Google Play, that it seems a bit of a waste not to continue to utilize this knowledge and Play status.

I've also been watching quite a few Starter Story videos on YouTube recently and I've seen more case studies of mobile apps that have been successful. I think creating a niche for Monday.com is also maybe not the best route right now because, I'm not that familiar with Monday.com. I believe one of the reasons why the Starter Stories (SSs) of the Shopify bundling app and the Google Sheets-Notion connector app were successful is that the bundling guy was very familiar with Shopify during his freelancing time and the Sheets-Notion guy was very familiar with Notion and/or Google Sheets API from his freelancing.

For me, I'm not super familiar with Monday.com so there would be a bit of a learning curve to what's needed there. With other topics/subjects like home ownership, property management, finance tracking etc., I believe this could be a more beneficial place to start with an MVP (wireframes, simple app) for a shorter/defined time period (~3-5 months) and a focus on validating the idea within that time.

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