Show HN: Track Habits with a Tweet
xtreeks.com
Why?
It's much more motivating to share progress with others on the same journey, whether it's learning math, building in public, lifting weights, running, losing weight, learning a language, doing a side project, etc.
Here's what my habit page looks like: https://xtreeks.com/gabemays (I'll be adding my other habits soon)
Longer version - Here's a confession: This is a 10+ year obsession that my wife teases me about. I've been using various habit tracking tools for over a decade and have had multiple 1,000 day streaks.
It started with I when a PM at a public tech co and got serious about dogfooding (using my own product). So I made a little script that'd make a GitHub commit whenever I used my product. I did it for over 1,000 days. I also grew the product from 7 to 9 figures ARR in a few years. I'm not saying that was the sole reason, but I'm sure it didn't hurt :)
After trying dozens of habit apps I've realized they're all pretty much the same. Two main issues:
1. They are great for doing small things, like taking your vitamins daily. But for doing hard things consistently you need a different approach.
2. After using any habit app for a year or so the core mechanics break down and it actually becomes counter productive for various reasons. I will solve those long-term issues with this app because I've encountered them over and over.
Why now:
- In 2023 I started using Math Academy daily to re-learn math as an adult. I wrote about my experience after 100 days here: https://gmays.com/math Now I'm at over 500 days of doing math daily. But that summer my volume started dropping because it was getting HARD and I was balancing it with other obligations, especially in the summers with the kids out of school. I was consistent, but my volume sucked, which created a doom loop that slowed progress significantly. After trying everything, I recently learned that sharing my daily updates in the Math Academy community on X (https://x.com/i/communities/1833198423593431339) really helped since there were many others on the same journey and we keep each other going, especially when things get hard (yay integrals).
- I've been searching for the perfect habit app for over a decade. I got so frustrated recently that I considered buying one for $10k that was for sale. But it'd one a major rebuild, so instead decided I'd pay $5k to get help building a new one from scratch quickly (that's how much I wanted it). So I called my best friend (who happens to be the best engineer I know) and said I needed this and I'd either pay him to help or he could work on it with me as a product. Turns out he was looking for the same solution, so here we are.
- AI is good enough now to recognize and understand habits cheaply. I've been building AI native apps since 2023, so this would be pretty straight forward for the MVP. I'm excited to add image recognition soon, which eliminates the need to build as many integrations. There are so many other ways to streamline things with AI as well that'll be fun to build.
- AI is changing a lot of things, but what it will never change is the human desire to learn, do hard things and connect with others on similar journeys. That's what I noticed in myself, which pushed me to make Xtreeks. E.g. in my Math Academy group there are also a LOT of others trying to (re)learn math and ML to break into the industry.
Try the app and let me know what you think. You can just login with X to create an account. It's free and the current plan will stay that way. I plan to add paid plans in the future for the more expensive to run features so we can at least run this at breakeven.
But even if it never makes a dollar I'll be using it for the next decade since I spent the last decade looking for exactly this. I hope you love it as much as I do.
Here's the site where you can login to try it: https://xtreeks.com