When I finish making an app, the first thing I feel is not a sense of accomplishment, but rather an awkward sensation. I write no specifications, conduct no user interviews—I just keep moving my hands because "I'm the one who's inconvenienced," and before I know it, a screen has been born. As I gaze blankly at that screen, a thought suddenly occurs to me: this is just my personality laid bare.
This essay is about how the act of making an app became, without my realizing it, an exercise in "getting to know myself." It's not about technology. If you're someone who keeps making things individually, I'm sure you've felt this sensation somewhere along the way—and I want to write about it honestly.
"I'm the one who's inconvenienced"—the starting point
The first time Lily made a decent app, it was because she wanted to eliminate a small inconvenience in her daily life. There were plenty of off-the-shelf task management tools and note-taking apps, but somehow none of them felt quite right. "Well then, I'll just make one myself." It's that first step that anyone doing personal development takes at least once.
The first few weeks were purely fun. I'd think of features I wanted and implement them on the fly, nurturing a screen that only I would use. No one was evaluating me, there were no deadlines—just time to make what I wanted to make.
But around the time it started taking shape, a strange sensation began to emerge.
"Priorities" I Hadn't Even Realized I Was Making
When I looked back at the app's design, I found unconscious decisions stacked up everywhere. For example, I kept putting off the notification feature. I thought "I'll implement it later," but ended up not touching it for three months straight.
When I thought back on why I kept postponing it, the answer was simple: I'm not good with notifications. I live with most of my smartphone notifications and chat badges turned off. Without realizing it, my values had seeped directly into the app's design.
A few months later, I had a chance to show my work-in-progress app to Tanaka (a pseudonym), a friend who also does solo development. It was more of a casual "take a look" than asking for serious feedback.
After Tanaka went through the screens, he said this: "This is an app for Lily to use, isn't it? You don't seem to have thought much about other people using it."
I was honestly a bit annoyed. I replied, "I'm making it so it can be used by a general audience," but Tanaka just smiled and continued: "But there's no onboarding, all the error messages are technical jargon, and there are too many settings—a first-time user would definitely get lost."
He was completely right.
The Pretense of "General Audience"
That's when I first realized: while saying "I'm making this for someone," I was actually only building things that were convenient for me. I didn't explain things I took for granted, I omitted screens I found unnecessary, and I chose structures I preferred.
I was using the pretty word "problem-solving," but the reality was "I solved my own problem in my own way, creating a tool just for myself."
Prompted by Tanaka's comment, I later rewrote the onboarding from scratch—17 screens worth. I restructured it on the assumption that a user who knew nothing would be touching it for the first time, explaining things step by step. The work was tedious and exhausting, but through that process, I felt firsthand "just how much I assume people already understand." While fixing the app, I was learning my own habits.
When you do personal development, you tend to accumulate notes and logs. "This didn't work out," "Why won't this run?"—scribbled notes pile up messily in files and notebooks.
One day, I had a chance to reread six months' worth of notes, and I noticed something: I was repeating the same pattern of failure over and over.
The Habit of "Getting Bored Before Finishing"
The phrase that kept appearing in Lily's failure log was "I moved on to the next feature before nailing down the details." I'd implement something roughly and write "I'll fix it later," but that "later" never came.
This wasn't just about app development. Tidying up around the house, books I'd started but not finished, letters I'd written halfway through. I'd rush through things and struggle with the finishing touches. The app's failure log was teaching me about my tendencies across my entire life.
I thought I kind of knew this, but I'd never seen it laid out so clearly before.
How to Use the Discovery
So should I try to eliminate that habit? No, I don't think so. If I have a tendency to get bored before finishing, then I should just make things small enough from the start that there's nothing to finish. I changed to releasing one feature at a time, then adding the next one. I adapted my development style to fit my habits.
That's when I first truly understood: knowing your own tendencies isn't about fixing yourself—it's about finding methods that work for you.
Personal development is solitary work. You think alone, implement alone, struggle alone. I actually rather like that solitude, but the problem is that "solitude clouds the mirror."
When you're only working with yourself, assumptions harden without you noticing. Without Tanaka's feedback, I probably would have kept going believing "I'm making this properly for a general audience."
After release, I had a similar experience. Someone showed up using the app in a way I'd never anticipated. I'd thought "this feature is for purpose A," but they were using it for something completely different. At first I thought "they're using it wrong," but when I talked to them, their way of using it actually made more sense.
My "correct way of using it" was just a phantom that existed in my head. By showing it to someone and having them use it, the outline of my own assumptions becomes visible. I think this is the most direct moment when app development connects to self-understanding.
Resumes and self-promotion statements try to be polished, so they end up too clean. But an app you made yourself has no filter.
The priorities in your design, the features you put off, the details you obsessed over, the UI you cut corners on. All of it—the personality, values, and true feelings of the maker—seeps through.
When I look at various people's apps in the personal development community these days, I find that the "seeping through" part is most interesting. More than the tech stack, what features someone "deliberately didn't include" tells me more about the maker.
You Don't Have to Fear the Mirror
Hearing "your personality comes through in what you make" might sound scary. Lily thought so at first too. If my habits show through, shouldn't I hide them better?
But now I think the opposite. Looking at yourself reflected in the mirror isn't shameful—it's just information. You have this tendency, you have this value, so your design ends up this way. There's no harm in knowing, and knowing changes how you build next time.
Counseling and self-analysis worksheets exist as ways to "know yourself" in a short time. I think that has its value.
But if you're doing personal development, you already have another method. Keep making things. Fail, fix, show someone, fix again. This repetition accumulates over months and years without you noticing, and eventually you start to see the outline of "oh, I'm this kind of person."
You don't have to rush, and you don't have to make it neat. You can understand yourself while you're making.
From the day Tanaka told me "this is a tool for you alone," Lily has been gradually changing the app. But it wasn't just the app that changed—the habit of facing my own assumptions changed alongside it.
The more you polish a mirror, the better you can see. I now think that making things continuously is polishing the mirror. I believe what you're making right now will teach you the same thing somewhere along the way.
Lily（@bokuwalily）― Individual developer. Making iOS apps and web services in tandem with AI.
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Lily（@bokuwalily）― After leading a marketing organization of 50 people as CMO, I now make iOS apps and web services individually. I consult on customer acquisition, user flow design, and AI implementation and business automation.
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