Habiton

Find out how a technology startup was able to raise $1.2 million with a mobile app for building habits and monitoring progress.

Client

Established in 2021, the client is a technology startup aiming to find a product-market fit, attract investors, and generate revenue. Based in Europe, the company sees its mission in delivering transformative user experiences in the mobile app world for healthy lifestyle.

Project goal

The startup founders had extensive experience in the mobile application marketing industry. At some moment, they discovered that software solutions for productivity, healthy lifestyle, and motivation were gathering pace. This way, the company recognized the opportunity to enter the market, win the audience, and make profit with a trending product.

In this context, the client was looking for a trusted provider of mobile development services to create an MVP of a mobile app (iOS, Android) for building good habits. The IT firm they hired, however, did not meet expectations: the startup was not satisfied with the quality of intermediate results. In addition, the vendor was not able to meet some due dates.

After thorough IT partner research on Clutch.co, a B2B review and rating platform, they reached out to Aligned Code. Finally, plenty of positive testimonials, a high rating on Clutch, and a video meeting with our IT experts convinced the company to hire our team.

The client needed to demonstrate the MVP to investors, so there were tight deadlines for delivery. Since the startup was going to launch the application in the competitive landscape, creating a catching intuitive design was crucial.

Solution

Our software experts began by analyzing project requirements and work scope completed by the previous IT vendor. As a result, we created a list of tasks, outlined a product implementation roadmap, and a provided cost estimate. In less than a week, our custom mobile app development team assembled a dedicated team of IT professionals.

Following Agile best practices, our software engineers delivered new features every 1–2 weeks. By showcasing intermediate results to the client, we were able to ensure the solution would meet expectations and introduce the required changes on the fly.

During the project, we made some useful recommendations, for example, to move away from an atomic design to improve scalability. Read the first challenge below to learn more.

To gain valuable insights into customer behavior and application success, we integrated the following data analytics tools:

• Amplitude for product analytics
• AppsFlyer for marketing analytics
• Adapty for sales analytics

Using RevenueCat, our mobile development team incorporated in-app subscriptions.

The challenges we solved:

• The previous team used an atomic design approach to build the product. However, they didn’t employ it properly: while atomic design is a good way to create user interface (UI) component libraries, the IT firm implemented it for the entire project, leading to scalability issues. As a result, it was rather difficult to classify components, although it is supposed to be a simple task.
  
  To address the problem, our software experts moved the software product to a layer-based architecture, which is especially suited for small to medium-sized codebases. With this architectural type, it is very easy to store, move, and categorize files.
  
  However, the architectural style doesn’t fit large-scale solutions because of navigation complexity. For example, to find out what a certain feature is built from, a software engineer has to look into the code, which takes time and is just inconvenient.
  
  This way, as the mobile application was growing in functionality, we gradually migrated it to a feature-based architecture, which works great for bigger projects.
• The app data (habits, progress, etc.) had to be stored on user devices locally in order to enable offline mode, so that customers could interact with the product when there is no Internet connection. Most importantly, it was crucial to provide local storage to address the following data management problems:
  
  Serialization/deserialization. In order to transform an object into the sequence of bytes or get an object from a sequence of bytes.
  
  Invalidation. When a user completed a habit indicating that on the main screen, the data on profile and statistics screens had to be instantly updated.
  
  Hydration. All the data (e.g., day, progress, statistics) must be properly loaded from a local storage every time a user opens the application.
  
  Data persistence. It was necessary to decide when exactly to save the data: with each action modifying the data or when the user session ends. While the first option could cause performance issues, the second one had risks of app crashes and data losses.
  
  To set up local data storage and enable efficient data management, our software developers chose React Query data-fetching library. We’ve already worked with the tool a lot and knew that it would be perfectly suited for resolving all the necessary issues. With React Query, we tweaked smooth fetching, caching, synchronization, and state updates.
  
  For example, by deduping numerous requests for the same data into a single one and implementing lazy loading data, our software experts significantly optimized performance. We also set up efficient memory management and garbage collection of state. Using React Query, our team made it possible to instantly reflect updates to data.

In order to achieve the smooth operation of a habit tracker app, our QA professionals used various testing types, including manual, usability, and functional testing.

Aligned Code established effective collaboration with our client. With daily meetings and regular (daily and weekly) reports, the client was always aware of the product stage and work scope left. We also provided the startup with access to the time tracking system, so that it could easily monitor project progress.

Key features

Our team created a mobile app for iOS and Android that helps users build healthy habits and achieve their objectives easier.

1. Personalized onboarding flow
2. Advanced statistics
3. 30 days challenges and journeys
4. Advanced habit creation screen
5. Timer and Focus Modes
6. Offline mode
7. Calendar
8. Personal notes
9. Progress tracking
10. Reward system