Koi

Habits, to-dos, fitness, and nutrition in one system. Working iOS beta through the Apple Developer Program, now in customer interviews and moving into real testing this fall. Design, build, and product direction are mine. I was running my life across five apps and a notes file, and none of them knew about each other. Goals in one place. Habits in another. Workouts somewhere else. Each app was fine on its own. The problem was that no single one of them could answer the only question that matters: am I actually doing the things I said I would? Every tool I tried failed in one of two directions. To-do apps are too rigid and only hold tasks. Notion and its relatives are too open-ended, so you spend more time building the system than using it. Koi is opinionated. It has a point of view about what someone needs to see, so there is nothing to assemble before you can use it. I built Koi to close my own gaps. Interviewing people who didn’t build it showed me which of those gaps they share. Almost everyone had tried a system before, and those systems rarely failed loudly. They died quietly because keeping them up took effort and nothing held anyone to it. What got people back on track was a reset, not a new app. That changed what Koi is for. It doesn’t ask people to give up the tools they already trust. Quick notes go to Notes, dated to-dos go to the calendar, and movement comes in from Apple Health. Koi’s job is accountability: check-ins and resets that show up before you notice you’ve fallen off. Personalized notifications and widgets come next, because people told me they tune out generic reminders and want to spend less time in apps, not more. The hard part was never features. Anyone can add a screen. The hard part is deciding what to leave out, because every feature makes the product slightly less clear about what it’s for. Most of the work has been removal, and the interviews made it sharper. The customer isn’t a type of person, it’s a type of pain: someone who keeps trying, keeps falling off, and is patching it together with tools that don’t talk to each other. What I still don’t know is whether those people will stick with it. The interviews tell me the problem is real. Only real use can tell me whether Koi solves it, and that is what this fall is for.