Today, Benny was approved and released on the App Store.
After years of building products for clients, I finally shipped one of my own.
That sentence feels simple, but it took me a long time to get here.
Years of unfinished ideas
I have had plenty of ideas over the years.
Some stayed in my notes. Some became designs. Others made it as far as an unfinished Xcode project before I moved on to something else.
The problem was rarely that I could not build them. I kept finding reasons not to finish them.
The scope became too large. The idea stopped feeling exciting. Client work took priority. Sometimes, I started polishing details before proving that the core product was useful.
Eventually, each project would disappear into a folder with all the others.
Benny was my attempt to break that pattern.
Building Benny
I started working on Benny two months ago, mostly during evenings, weekends, and whatever spare time I could find.
The idea was simple: create a place where I could keep track of the coffee I drink, remember what I liked, and gradually understand my preferences.
I did not want to turn it into a huge platform. I wanted to build something focused, useful, and small enough that I could actually release it.
Even with a limited scope, there were plenty of decisions to make.
What information should someone save about a coffee? How quickly should they be able to add an entry? Which details are useful, and which ones only add friction? What should the app feel like when someone opens it for the first time?
Some of those decisions worked. Others will need to be revisited.
That is part of shipping.
Saving a coffee for launch day
A few weeks ago, a friend visited from El Salvador and brought me a bag of coffee from Viva Espresso.
I could have opened it immediately, but I decided to save it.
I told myself I would open it when Benny was finished and available on the App Store. It became a small launch-day ritual and another reason to keep moving whenever the remaining work felt endless.
Today, I finally opened it.
It was a small moment, but it made the release feel real.
Shipped, not finished
Benny is available now, but it is not finished.
There are bugs to fix, features to rethink, and parts of the experience that I already want to improve.
I have a growing list of ideas, but I also want to be careful not to make the app more complicated than it needs to be.
The next step is to see how people actually use it.
Which parts are useful? Where do people get stuck? What do they expect the app to do that it does not do yet?
Before release, most product decisions are based on assumptions. Once the app is being used by real people, it can start showing you what it should become.
Why this release matters
Benny is not the largest or most complex product I have worked on.
It is meaningful because I finished it.
After years of helping clients bring their products to life, and after many personal ideas that never saw the light of day, I finally released something of my own.
There is still a lot of work ahead, but it feels good to have crossed the line between building and shipping.
Benny is now available on the App Store.