I read an article by Steph Smith entitled, "How to Be Great? Just Be Good, Repeatably", where she wrote about the importance of being consistent with small habits that compound. In another article she spelled it out: "The best way to stay committed to your goals is to a) track progress daily and b) share your progress openly."

This sounded simple enough, but there was one problem: I had tried tracking my habits before and it didn't work. I would make a beautiful table in my journal, get all excited, track for a few days, and then never look at it again.

That's where the idea for Harold came from. I needed a habit tracker that would come to me, ask me for the data, and make it really easy and convenient. That way I didn't have to remember to track / also have to make a habit of tracking at the same time I was trying to make habits of these other things. I had been interested in applications of SMS and this seemed like a great use case. It also seemed that SMS tech was getting easier to implement with no-code tools.

The name Harold came later. At the time my sister was pregnant with a boy and I wanted her to name him Harold. She wasn't going for it, so I just named my project that instead.

My biggest channels are Twitter, Product Hunt, and Google, in that order. I followed the build in public methodology on Twitter, just tweeting about my progress and journey, which worked well. And then I launched on Product Hunt which got me ~350 signups. Only a small number of those have converted to paid customers so far so I'm trying to learn more about the people who are willing to pay for it and what they want.