When I told people I was building a countdowns app, most of them were polite but certainly not excited. They'd say, "Oh, okay. Cool," and then change the subject. Fair enough. There are zillions of countdowns apps. Another one is not going to set the world on fire.
But a few people reacted very differently: the ones who knew about Numerous. Or as one of them put it, "Numerous 3.0!" They got it right away.
A Missing Thing
Years ago, my friend and frequent collaborator John Scalo and I built an app called Numerous. It tracked numbers of all kinds: counters, scores, measurements, KPIs, habits, and, yes, countdowns. It was achingly awesome and developed a cult following, but it never found a mainstream audience and ultimately it failed.
When Numerous disappeared, something small but meaningful went with it. I'd used countdowns in that app constantly. And I've been missing them for more than ten years.
Every so often I'd think about standing the whole thing back up just for that one feature, but I never did. The absence lingered, and eventually I decided to look for a solution.
A Solved Problem?
I knew there were dozens of countdowns apps already on the App Store. Maybe I could just use one of those to scratch my countdowns itch. So I looked at what was available.
What I found was a lot of mediocrity. The existing apps weren't exactly broken, but they were definitely unpleasant. They were riddled with ads, sometimes full-screen unskippable video ads. Many had candy-colored "lickable" design that felt like a postcard from another era. And most had constant nags to pay for a subscription. All in service of squeezing more revenue out of a "mature" category.
I refused to deal with any of that. Maybe, I thought, I should just write my own. After all, I had been looking for another coding project…
Choosing Something That Felt Too Small
I had been playing with AI coding assistants, starting with Gemini CLI, then moving to Cursor, and finally settling on Claude Code. I had already written a couple of web apps, and I was ready to make an actual product. I wanted to design something beautiful, build it, test it, set a price, get it through App Store review, and see an actual transaction happen. I had never personally taken an iOS app all the way through that process on my own and it sounded like an interesting challenge.
So I asked myself a simple question: what's the smallest thing I could build that would be useful enough to justify going through the entire pipeline?
Countdowns fit the bill nicely—and at the same time felt like too little. Which was exactly the appeal.
Numerous had failed because it tried to do too much, to be everything to everybody. It wound up being a mile wide and an inch deep. A simple countdowns app wouldn't have that problem, but it would scratch an itch I'd had for years.
Charging Money
I also decided early on not to make it free. If I was going to have skin in the game on this little project, so were my users. Plus, a free download doesn't tell you much. A payment, even a small one, does. It's a signal that someone sees enough value in the product to make a conscious decision to pay for it.
Pricing also forces everything else to be real: payments, taxes, payouts. A project without revenue is a hobby.
Company as Container
To support that, I created a small company, DGR Labs, LLC. Not because I wanted to start a company (I've done that plenty of times) but because I needed a clean container. I didn't want my name on the App Store listing. I didn't want app revenue flowing into my personal accounts. Anyone who has gone down that path will tell you that they're still dealing with spammy email and phone calls years later.
This time I wanted separation. Something that could sell apps, pay its own bills, and stay out of the way.
My financial goal for the company is modest. I want it to cover my tooling costs. Claude Code, Gemini Pro, GitHub, and related subscriptions run me about $200 a month. The company itself also has a little overhead (a registered agent, for example). If a few small apps could pay for the tools used to build them, that would be great.
So I sat down to create Countdowns by DGR Labs. The first version of the app, which actually worked, took Claude Code 4m 11s to create. Four minutes and eleven seconds. Wow. Then I started the real work: designing all of the things that surround the core functionality to make it a real product. That took about two more weeks.
First Light
Countdowns went live on the App Store two days ago. So far, two people have bought the Pro upgrade. Twenty dollars. But as the kids would say, "I'm monetized!"
That's not a milestone in any traditional sense, but that's ok—it wasn't meant to be. What matters was that everything is working. The app passed App Store review and went live. A couple of people paid for it! If you're one of them, thanks! Money moved through the system and into the bank account. And it's more revenue than Numerous ever generated. (Never let anyone tell you to, "Get big first and then turn on the monetization spigot.")
A Larger Space Than Expected
I had assumed Countdowns would be a narrow passage, something I'd squeeze through and move on from. Instead, it opened up. Even something as simple as a countdown app turns out to have depth: design questions, copyright issues with background images, permissions flows, first-use experience decisions, hell, even choosing a name. Addressing each of these has been fun. The implementation has been fun. Working with Claude Code has been fun.
And I've kept going.
I already have another app in progress, and a much cooler one, if I do say so myself: CD Wally. It started with the same "Does this really justify an app?" question and has blossomed into its own thing. (A post I made on Threads showing a short video clip of it currently has 5.9k likes.)
Countdowns will not be the last thing to pass through this pipeline.
Flywheel Dynamics
I'm excited to be making again, and not just for myself but for users, strangers, customers. The DGR Labs website shows some of the projects I've worked on over the last few weeks and they are very varied. Some (like Monk and Pilot Skills Trainer) will remain open source projects for me to tinker with. Some (like Countdowns and CD Wally) will become actual products.
But they all keep adding energy to the flywheel.
