it's not just you, people have different preferences and that's fine :D

I'm also not a fan of overly-funny writing, but I just wanted to say that I found your style quite enjoyable. Maybe it's because a can relate somewhat to your situation... :b

in my case, I would never sell Benji to anyone else because my life literally depends on it. The business part is hard tho.

After years of building in public, I'm scared that you're right. But the problem is, my app is now live (benji.so), and it's publicly out there for people with VC money to start copying features from it ...

I 100% agree with you.

author here: for me it was important because after a while the app I was using was stale and wasn't shipping updates anymore. Also, as I was learning more about productivity, I reached the limits of the app. I wanted more features and I was coming up with tons of ideas that I could implement into my app, and other devs wouldn't care about implementing these ideas. I wanted control. So I finally shipped Benji (https://benji.so)

Sorry to hear that. As someone who actually shipped a lot of things, i'm still going through the "I believe in it" and "don't believe in it" cycle almost daily. Don't let that stop you.

I did! 2 years ago I launched Benji (https://benji.so) (but rewrote it from scratch this time)

Nice! Thanks for the update!

It's not made up, I'm not using the competitor app for years, and I didn't want to give them more attention because this space is super competitive.

nah, back when I wrote this article tick tick was a super basic app. I've tried it a few times but it never clicked for me, not enough features.

Ah shoot it was worth a guess. Huge fan of Tick Tick

Author here! I need to update this article. Years later, I actually got motivated by the comments on HN (whenever this gets posted). P

People are always like "why don't you just ship your app?" ... so I did!

I'm happy I went through with and it's way WAY better than any competitor in this category

Check it out at https://benji.so (landing page is still w.i.p)

The landing page lags my browser. How is that even possible - it's a splash screen with a few images. What on earth are you doing on that page.

The author complains about the bloated web and then proceeds to do the exact same thing with his landing page

Rotating an image and moving some text apparently

OK Steve.

I went through an unshipped app dev cycle that was fairly similar in many ways. Started on React, then RN, then Flutter, and eventually migrated away from graphql into sqlite.

My app had some similar aspirations -- to bridge the gap between habit motivation, goal adherence measurement, task scheduling & rescheduling. I worked on it for a few years, and my identity was very much wrapped up in eventually bootstrapping a company.

For me, the decision to let go of the project came in multiple phases, but one big closer was that I simply didn't want to be an app dev in the long run. While difficult to let go of, I currently feel good about the decision. Also, as evidenced by the resurrection part of the story, "nothing is ever fully lost" anyhow, though I doubt I'll ever return to this particular project.

One key idea I had for expanding beyond the "high cognitive load" nature of most productivity apps was to implement a "life module" marketplace of sorts that would let, say, a fitness influencer sell a workout routine + meal plan + journal template one could "install" into their life.

LLMs will also make detecting fall-off and attempting to attribute causes, or respond to "non-actions" much more feasible, which I think is important for anyone not type-A enough to use a productivity app consistently every day on their own.

I just tried it and the detected timezone for me is called:

"Africa/Ceuta (Romance Standard Time) (UTC+01:00) Brussels, Copenhagen, Madrid, Paris"

While the assigned delta with GMT is correct, this is confusing as hell because neither Brussels, Copenhaguen, Madrid or Paris are in Africa. You may want to take a look at the TZ info you are using.

EDIT: See comment below, this is not an issue.

But Africa/Ceuta time aligns with CE(S)T for longstanding national administrative reasons, I believe. That’s why those other cities are listed, since Africa/Ceuta time is not linked by policy, regulation or legislation with any African time zones…

Time is one of those human constructs that isn’t strongly bound to geographic or perhaps even physical reality. Look at the International Date Line or Chinese timezone maps for examples that are “bigger” than Africa/Melila and Africa/Ceuta.

We should all be glad that people are thanklessly doing the hard work to keep the TZ databases updated.

I stand corrected, I had skipped the "Europe/Paris" and "Europe/Madrid" options that are present in the long listbox. I had assumed that someone from Paris would be confused by having to select the timezone "Africa/Ceuta".

Hi there, I can't see your white menu links on the white background, thought you'd like to know - https://i.imgur.com/Yd1hniV.png

Hi! Looks great, maybe I'll give it a try... Is it named after this guy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benji ? I was a huge fan of him (them?) when I was about 6-8 years old!

...and sorry about expressing my frustration (and suspicion) about you not mentioning the name of your "competitor"! I guess now that you have released your own app, the chances of you mentioning it are even smaller (if it's still around at all)?

It's named after my dog Benji haha. Yes you're right, I'm not gonna mention any competitors, especially on a viral HN article :) There's a chance I might make a /comparison page in the future though.

hey HN! thanks to whoever posted this. An update on this is that Sizzy is still going strong!

Lately I've been super busy with building [Benji](https://benji.so) which is a Life OS and organizes your habits, todos, routines, planner, fasting, meal tracking and a billion other features. I got tired of paying subscriptions for 31855 mediocre apps so I built a single master app that combines everything.

A lot of people ask me about my philosophy of shipping so I made [Zero To Shipped](https://zerotoshipped.com) which teaches the details of my stack along with my mindset about shipping paid products. So far there's 92 videos and 10 hours of content, but the final version will be more than 200 videos.

I hope I'm not violating some HN rules when I'm talking about the things that I made...

Feel free to AMA and I'd happy to answer your questions!