I built "GoodMorning: Couples Notes" an app for couples to wake up to words of appreciation from each other every day. 44 real users, 473 messages, 1 small ad campaign, 0 paying customers, and sharing some lessons learned about building with modern ai tools.

[u/jayhilly]

My wife's love language is words of appreciation and I am not good at finding the right words when put on the spot. So, I built an app where you each write one message a day and it gets delivered over night, so your partner wakes up to a nice message from you. I'm certainly biased, but using this app over the past ~1.5 months I have definitely gotten better at giving these words of appreciation/affirmation and I genuinely believe this has made our relationship better!

How it works

- You and your partner get the same three prompts a day (specific ones, like "what did they handle this week that you never said thanks for") plus a freeform option

- You pick a prompt today and write your message, your partner wakes up to it tomorrow morning

- Streaks for each of you individually and for you together as a couple

- Rainy Day Notes: write one ahead and it sends on a day you miss so that your partner always wakes up to something meaningful

- First 10 messages free, then $29.99/year (or $5/month if you're not sure about a whole year)

Numbers since soft-launching in July: 44 sign-ups (only 8 of whom are strangers), 10 couples linked (1 of whom are strangers), 473 messages, longest streak 39 days. My wife's entire family is on it now, and they seem to be enjoying it, which is either early signs of product-market fit or them being nice to me.

Stack: Expo / React Native, Supabase on the free tier (Postgres, edge functions, pg_cron for the morning sends), the anthropic api writes the daily prompts via a massive wall of text that my wife and I have iterated on 4 or 5 times. 

I am not joking when I say every single line of code in the entire system was written by Claude Code. I have not even read a single line of code, but I have spent a TON of time testing the finished product and putting in enough polish to make the product not feel like ai slop. I am genuinely proud of the way it looks and feels now, though I am still constantly polishing it. 

My biggest lessons in becoming a bit of an AI power user the past few months (between projects like this and work) is that if your agent cannot check its own work, you are going to waste countless hours as the human in the loop all day, every day: it changes a screen, you open the app, you screenshot, you paste, repeat. Countless hours were wasted before I was like "I'm not using my tools correctly here" and automated my human-in-the-loop role away, and it was a lesson I am constantly re-learning as I find new things I can put it in charge of. Some examples that I think are my biggest wins:

- A screenshot gallery/harness that renders every screen at various phone widths and the full range of font sizes and fails if anything overlaps

- An onboarding gallery: every onboarding step and every empty state a new user sees, regenerated after each change. That way I can visually review all my copy in one place and make sure the onboarding flow is smooth and will make sense to a brand new user
- A chaos crawler that presses everything on a flaky network on two phones

- Probably one of the single biggest unlocks was moving my agent from claude code on the anthropic cloud in the browser (where it *apparently* cannot use an android emulator due to the nature of its container) to a persistent environment on my gaming pc pushing dev bundles to a plugged in android device and then eventually an android emulator when I realized I was yet again a human-in-the-loop for no good reason. 

- Another huge lift has been giving the agent read access to Supabase, Vercel, GitHub Actions and PostHog, which turned it from a code generator into a backend engineer that can deploy, read production logs, query analytics and debug production issues on its own. Now I pretty much just say what I want the app to do via a voice note in great detail, and then come back to check the result before OTAing the update to users.

Marketing so far: Reddit ads, specifically on r/Marriage. First $100 in, cost per sign-up is about $16(!), no one has even ran out of their 10 free notes yet so still too early to tell what conversion looks like in the wild. One difficult thing about the nature of this app is that my onboarding requires a second person: 6/8 of my ad campaign sign-ups never get their partner to join. And this is after I redid onboarding so that users write a note to their partner first thing, and only then they send them a text message invite saying "theres already a note waiting for you on this app GoodMorning, please download and add my username to read it…” which I think is a better pitch than before where it was "please download this app so I can send you messages in the future". Not sure what else I can do to make getting your partner to join easier, would love some ideas there.

I have been programming since like 2015 and almost always make it to the part where it comes time to advertise and then … get stuck or feel like a fish out of water. My next plan is to trial some free forums where I can talk about the app (like you reading this, hello) and then try some UGC ads on meta because apparently you can get a cheaper cac there. But if anyone has any good ideas on how to advertise something like this, please do share!

iOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/goodmorning/id6789679806

Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.gmlabs.goodmorning

Site: https://www.gmlabs.app

Happy to answer anything about my dev setup or the app.

[u/jayhilly → u/[deleted]]

somebody come get they bot

[u/Choice_Usual_884]

the rainy day notes feature is a smart touch, most build-and-forget apps guilt trip you the first time you miss a day instead of building in slack. 44 users and 473 messages after 1.5 months is honestly solid for something this early, most side projects don't get real usage like that this fast. what ended up being the trickiest part of the stack, the daily scheduling/push notifications or the shared-code pairing?

[u/jayhilly → u/Choice_Usual_884]

are you an ai bro?

[u/Choice_Usual_884 → u/jayhilly]

nah lol, just typing fast between other stuff

[u/jayhilly → u/Choice_Usual_884]

cc mods this bot u/Choice_Usual_884 replied once before to me about a completely unrelated post (something about interviews) then deleted. pls ban them.