Stubborn

I'm such a dumb-stubborn-ass perfectionist who keeps delaying and delaying my app launch...

I just spent 3 weeks building my endometriosis tracking app.

Three weeks of react native problems. Three weeks and still ZERO builds in anyone's hands.

Not even my girlfriend's. And she's the one who HAS endo.

What Happened

After selling my last app, I spent two weeks researching. I lurked on Reddit, read TikTok and YouTube comments about endometriosis, sent cold DMs to women in endo communities, had long conversations with my girlfriend.

There WERE signals. Women complained existing trackers weren't fit for pelvic inflammatory disease. They couldn't track what actually mattered. Self-tracking is essential but tools suck.

So I had done research. I had talked to real people.

But after 3 weeks, she still HASN'T used a single build.

Not bc I was being precious about polish. But bc I had such skill issues with React Native that I couldn't even get the damn thing running on her iPhone.

Challenges I Faced

Everyone says "don't build before you validate."

But my problem wasn't that I built before validating.

It's that I spent 3 weeks trying to build and still have nothing to put in anyone's hands.

I told myself I was "building skills" and "learning React Native." Which is technically true because I'm way better at mobile dev now than I was a month ago.

But I'm going to be honest, I became stuck way too many times: state management issues, technical debts and build pipelines... all those gnarly issues that come from being a noob still.

Maybe I should have read more of the fu*king manual (I hate it)... Maybe I shouldn't have cut corners... Maybe, maybe... A senior dev might have avoided these entirely. He at least would have worked through my issues in a matter of hours, not days.

The positives is that I DID get dramatically better at mobile dev. I built a complete boilerplate I can reuse. I can ship apps way faster now.

But I could have gotten 80% of that learning by putting out a janky product in week 1 and iterating.

Instead I broke my own momentum by getting stuck in technical problems when I could have shipped a somewhat broken but functional product.

The Healthcare Excuse

I kept telling myself: "this is a healthcare app, it needs to be done right."

But looking back that's TOTAL cope!

There's a massive difference between:

• Shipping a buggy habit tracker with a rough UI and
• Shipping something that gives bad medical advice or mishandles health data

For an endo tracking app, the core safety requirements are:

• Don't lose people's data
• Don't expose their private health info
• Don't claim to diagnose or treat anything
• Be clear you're a tracking tool, not medical advice

I could have met ALL of those bars in week 1. The rest is just features and polish!

But I used "healthcare needs to be done right" as an excuse for my perfectionism. Which is really just fear of looking incompetent (oh shit mayday we have a problem...)

The n=1 Problem

Getting feedback from my girlfriend throughout was valuable. She has endo. She knows what matters.

But n=1 is still dangerous, even when that 1 person is your ideal user.

If I'm being honest with myself, I used her as a shortcut to avoid the discomfort of putting broken things in front of strangers.

Getting feedback from your partner in your living room is WAY easier than posting in endo subreddits and risking people telling you your idea sucks (or just getting banned totally - then having to go through the pain of creating another account and just in the end risking your app to be completely blacklisted - I assessed this risk clearly... I think)

If I had 5-10 other women testing alongside her, would I have built different features? Would I have cut corners and not shipped things she asked for bc nobody else cared?

maybe. but I probably left tons of insights on the table by not putting myself out there more.

Which Brings Me Back To Today

My goal for today - not this week, TODAY - is to get a working build in my girlfriend's hands.

The app is mostly done anyway. Maybe my onboarding flows or my illustrations and so on aren't quite correct. Maybe I don't have a nice paywall design yet.

But I'm going to watch her use it. See what breaks. See what's confusing. See what she actually needs vs what I thought she needed.

And then I'll post about it elsewhere.

Every day I spend "getting the app ready" is a day I'm optimizing for MY comfort instead of THEIR benefit.

In Conclusion

I keep saying "next time I'll validate first."

But that's still the wrong frame.

Validation isn't a step that happens before building.

Validation IS building.

You validate BY shipping broken things and watching people use them.

The right question isn't "how do I avoid wasting time building the wrong thing?"

It's "what's the fastest way to put something—anything—in someone's hands so I can learn what to build next?"

Sometimes that's a landing page. Sometimes it's a google form. Sometimes it's a buggy app that crashes half the time but still demonstrates the core value.

I often tell myself that I'm "building skills" when really I'm hiding from the discomfort of shipping half-baked work.

But at least now you know what I'm doing when I'm doing it.

So my new rule is:

if I'm not talking to at least 5 users every week, I'm not building
→ I'm just procrastinating.