TLC #2 - Voidhead

Hi 👋,
Second lunar challenge cycle completed successfully! 💪 (more or less)

What did I do?

TL;DR:
Meditation app focused on being simple and extensible: Voidhead.

The journey

This is the second project I develop for my personal challenge. It is important to me because I show to myself I can continue this rhythm without compromising the rest of my life.

Finding the idea

This time it was pretty easy to find the idea. I have been in and out of meditation for a while and I always thought meditation apps are sometimes overcomplicated. Also I thought most of them are pretty aggressive regarding asking you for money and I felt like having a good meditation experience should be free.

💡 Could I develop something in a week I could end up using and feeling proud of? 🚀

Basic prototype

So I have been playing with different meditation apps and I liked the simplicity of most of them. I had this mental idea of having a circle in the center of the screen and use it as the main guide for the meditation.
After one afternoon I had this simple prototype with different animations, one for “deep breathing”, one for “normal breathing” and one for “body-scanning”. It was cool I liked it, showed it to a couple of friends and they liked it. Good 👍 now I had to think the rest of the app.

Validation

This time I wanted to invest more in validation than last time. I decided I would setup a landing page and purchase some Facebook ads. I did it and waited to see if there was any interest. I let the experiment go on for a day or so and the results were not very good. I spent a couple of euros and got only a few clicks and one email subscription. I have some insights about this.
In fact I spent only an hour or so creating a mailchimp landing page and using some online tool to generate a fake screenshot of the app. It was a very low quality job because I wanted results quick. The main problem was that Facebook ads take up to 12 hours to be approved depending on when you set them up. I didn’t plan for that. I wanted to iterate the ads as I saw the results but it was nearly impossible with such a slow approval process.

I moved to real life and, like in my previous project, I talked about it to my friends and family. One friend of mine even shared the first prototype I hosted on my machine with some colleagues at work and they thought it was useful and even added it to their bookmarks. (So sorry that link will not work anymore :P). Again my close circle seemed to like the idea. Good 👍 but maybe they like it because they know me.

Continuing with prototype

So I was sharing all my iterations as soon as I had something visible with friends. They told me what they liked and what they didn’t. I started with a meditation of about 5 minutes, but then I simplified it as much as possible. Taking 5 minutes from people that wanted to give it a try was too much. So I set on a 1 minute session, and tried to let it clear that there will be longer versions coming soon.

On the tech side I invested A LOT in learning stuff I can now propagate to my other projects. I focused on usability and making the web application follow Progressive Web App standards. It can be installed and used offline.

The Project

I honestly think meditation is a thing. There are good meditation apps but I wanted something simpler. Just open your browser type voidhead.com and you are ready to meditate.

Why is it different?

This is something I asked myself at the beginning of the project. And I wrote this principles for myself to follow:

I am proud to say I think I followed all of them 💪

Conclusions

Next project

None. It is Christmas 🎅 and I want to disconnect a little. I will propagate some stuff I learn on this project to my other projects during this two weeks and recharge batteries for the following cycle.