Three tech stacks, two failed rebuilds, and one active beta user
I built a tool to stop lying to myself about how I work.
I've always been someone who juggles too many things at once. Client projects, side projects, ideas that feel urgent at 11 PM. My task list has never been short, and for a long time I thought the solution was just better prioritization. So I'd sit down, write everything out, tag tasks by priority, mark the revenue-generating ones, strike off the rest, and feel good about it for exactly a few days. Then I'd drift again. Back to working on things that felt productive but didn't really matter.
What I actually needed wasn't a better task list. I needed something to pull me back when I drifted. Something that would make me look at how I was spending my time and ask honestly: is this moving anything forward?
I time track my work. Have done for years. But I never looked at the reports unless a client needed an invoice. The data was there. The reflection never happened. That gap is what WorkBuddy is trying to close.
The journey to actually building it
WorkBuddy didn't start in February 2026. It started much earlier, as a capstone project in a Python developer program I joined. I interviewed users, validated the idea, got a green signal, and started building. FastAPI, Jinja templates, then htmx when I realized I needed a reactive UI, then Vue.js when htmx felt limiting. I made progress, then got a client project and WorkBuddy went to the backbench.
Over the next stretch I tried to rebuild it in WeWeb as I moved deeply into the world of Low code. Then considered Flutterflow for a mobile app. Neither took off. Life and client work kept pulling me back.
Finally in February this year I decided to get serious. I had Figma designs sitting from much earlier. I used those as the base, and with Claude Code and the original tech stack FastAPI, Vue.js, PostgreSQL, I built it properly and got it to beta.
That journey probably sounds messy. It was. But I don't think I'd have built the right thing if I'd rushed it the first time.
Where I am now
Beta is live. 25+ people signed up for the waitlist. Five actually signed up to the product. One is actively using it.
I'll be honest about what that tells me, because sugarcoating it would defeat the purpose of building in public.
Distribution and marketing are not my core strengths. I've built solid products before, computer vision solutions that ran at national conferences, client projects across low code and beyond. Building is not the hard part. Getting the right people to show up and stick around is.
The most surprising, and honestly a little annoying, thing I've learned in beta is how hard people find it to sit down and journal consistently. I assumed that once someone signed up, the problem was solved. Turns out signing up and actually doing the thing are two very different decisions. The users who are screaming this problem, who feel it the way I felt it, are the ones who will journal. The rest I can't force fit. That's the clearest thing beta has taught me so far.
Why I'm still building it
I'm not chasing a unicorn. I want WorkBuddy to become a profitable, sustainable product. Something that earns real revenue, ideally with enough autonomy that it runs without me having to be everywhere at once.
But right now the goal is simpler: find the people who genuinely need this, and build something that earns their trust every Sunday night when their weekly summary lands.
If you work alone and you recognize that drift I described, I'd love to hear how you currently make sense of your days. And if you want to try WorkBuddy, beta is open.
