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A comment on Show HN: I spent 4 months building Duolingo but for your life. Parent comment

Re:Show HN: I spent 4 months building Duolingo but for your ... by jitl on Saturday September 27, 2025 @10:34AM (#45396050)
My take is that the right workflow for people is quite varied. Everyone wants something that’s low friction and will keep them engaged but these daily behaviors are fundamentally high friction habits, so existing solutions are rarely satisfying in the long run.

They are also easy to build - you need one primitive: basic text storage, although scheduled push notifications are great to have. No need to sync stuff, no sharing/permission model, no scale issues you can’t solve with a b-tree SQLite index.

I think another factor is an increase in productivity-lifestyle content influencers, the sort of people who talk about Notion on TikTok. Speaking of Notion there’s like a zillion user-created habit tracker templates for Notion too. I work at Notion but don’t use it daily outside of work.

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Re:Show HN: I spent 4 months building Duolingo but for your ... by vunderba on Saturday September 27, 2025 @10:56AM (#45396244)
> Productivity-lifestyle content influencers

100% this. They fall into the same camp as "self-help books", "life coaches", and to certain extent "spiritual gurus".

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Re:Show HN: I spent 4 months building Duolingo but for your ... by accrual on Saturday September 27, 2025 @10:44AM (#45396140)
> My take is that the right workflow for people is quite varied.

I agree. I've been tempted lately to write my own local todo + notes + calendar app that fits the way I think about tasks and time. Kind of like developing a software glove for ones mental model. It's no wonder there are so many "gloves" in this space, everyone's model is unique.

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Re:Show HN: I spent 4 months building Duolingo but for your ... by jitl on Saturday September 27, 2025 @12:05PM (#45396972)
I would like notion to support this kind of glove making perfectly but right now it’s too slow and high friction to make sense for the domain for most people. Currently it only works for people with huge friction tolerance, and it’s missing quality calendar tooling & trustworthy configurable push.
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Re:Show HN: I spent 4 months building Duolingo but for your ... by theshrike79 on Monday September 29, 2025 @03:21AM (#45411134)
It's the same with mobile games.

There are only a limited number of game mechanics, people install for the theme and come back because of it.

You can take a 1:1 copy of a game, reskin it 12 different ways and 1 of those might be a hit.

For apps like this there aren't that many ways to track what you're doing, but people like different kinds of UX.

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