I design it. I design it. Then I build it. Then I build it.

Before I built anything, I sat down with four serious lifters. The same answers came back. They already track their training, and they judge how hard a set was by how many reps they had left in the tank (RIR). Every app they'd tried buried that under streaks, feeds and badges, until the training itself got lost in the noise. And one ask kept surfacing: they wanted to watch their strength hold, or slip, through a cut. That locked the plan: put RIR-based logging at the centre, show strength over time honestly, and cut everything that isn't the work.

The name does a lot of the work. A ram's horn grows a ring every year it lives, and your training is the same: every session is one more notch. So the mascot is a ram (I call him The Keeper) and the logo is a notched horn. The look is something I call Dark Ledger: warm near-black, dark all the way through, with monospace numbers and clean prose. Depth comes from soft frames over a faint ruled background. My one rule was that colour always has to mean something, so it's never there just to look nice.

The whole app runs on one move: log a set, and see right away what it was worth. Because it knows how hard the set felt, it can tell a real personal best from a fluke.

Most apps answer one thing: did you show up? Notch answers a harder one: did you get stronger? It takes a single logged set and turns that into a straight answer, plus a record you keep even if you delete the app.

I designed Notch and built it myself, in code, directing AI dev tools to do the heavy lifting. There's no hand-off between a Figma file and the real app — the SwiftUI is the design, so nothing gets lost in translation. That's how one person ships a proper iPhone app. Here's what it's made of:

The hard part was deleting things. I built a streak counter, liked it, then killed it, because a streak is exactly the game I was trying to get away from. I cut the exercise list from 873 down to 438, keeping only the ones I'd actually program myself. A few features I was excited about got pushed to after launch. When I wasn't sure something earned its place, it didn't make it in.

Notch isn't launched yet, so there's no retention or revenue to point at — and I won't pretend there is. What I can show is that the bet checked out before I committed to it, and that there's real demand waiting on it.

The job was to win over cold traffic: people landing from a search or an ad who'd never heard of the brand. The old homepage did the opposite. It threw sixty-plus challenges at you in one dense grid, every card just saying “LEARN MORE.” No pitch, no “how it works”, nothing telling you where to look first. And the things that actually sell the product, like the 450k-member community, the medal you earn, and the licensed challenges (Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter), were buried or missing. Show someone everything and they pick nothing.

So I stopped treating it like a catalogue and started treating it like a path. Where does a first-timer get stuck, and what do they need to see next? Four things guided the redesign.

The new homepage actually walks you through it. A clear pitch at the top, then a five-step “how it works”, then the proof: 450k members, an 87.93% completion rate, and logos from Forbes, Wired and Runner's World. After that, a handful of popular and licensed challenges, reviews, a money-back guarantee, and the FAQ. The full catalogue is still a click away under “View all challenges.” It just stopped being the first wall you hit.

The catalogue got the same thinking. The old All-Challenges page was a flat grid of medal thumbnails on white. It worked, but it sold the medal instead of the feeling of earning one, and your eye had nowhere to land. The redesign leads with photos of real people holding their medals, a line reminding you you're joining over a million others, cleaner cards, and a few nudges like bundles, discounts and “new” tags. Now it reads like a trip worth taking.

We A/B tested the new homepage against the old one. Click-through from organic traffic went up 68%. Giving first-timers a path to follow, instead of a wall to bounce off, did the work.