Countfie Countdown Widgets

• A proven niche: AppMonkey estimates put the category leader at about $770K a month, so the demand is real.
• Launch timed for the holiday season (Thanksgiving, Christmas), when people search for countdowns. Everything that didn't block the submission moved to version 1.1.
• Utilities as the primary category, where the countdown leaders and their charts are, and Lifestyle as the secondary one.

Result: A dated, narrow scope: first commit on 16 Oct 2026, live on the App Store on 21 Oct, five days later.

Built with: AppMonkey · Claude Code · Notion

• No account. Onboarding is three screens: the value, a first event from templates, and how to add the widget.
• Templates first: holidays come with the right date every year, so most countdowns take one tap.
• One simple flow for the rest: a home with big day numbers, details with a progress bar, an editor and a share card for Stories.

Result: 86% of people who started onboarding finished it (25 of 29), 69% created a countdown and 48% put a widget on their screen. PostHog, as of 28 October 2026.

Built with: Figma · SwiftUI · Claude Code

• Six sizes from one system: small, medium and large on the Home Screen, circular, rectangular and inline on the Lock Screen.
• Free themes (Solid, Light, Dark, Paper) and Premium ones (Holiday, Bubblegum, Autumn, Winter Arc, Photo). A Premium style without Premium falls back to Solid.
• Photo backgrounds through the system photo picker, so the app never asks for access to the photo library.

Result: 6 widget sizes and 9 themes from one style system, plus 3 live timer widgets.

Built with: WidgetKit · App Intents · Figma

• Contrast is a rule of the system: the text colour on each background is chosen automatically, cream or ink, whichever contrasts more.
• Secondary grey darkened from #7D786D to #6B665C to reach 4.5:1 on paper, chips, white cards and cream.
• Colours that drop below 3:1 on Paper or white fall back to ink, and contrast is covered by tests for every theme.

Result: WCAG contrast is checked in code for every theme and colour, not fixed by hand.

Built with: SwiftUI · Swift Testing · Claude Code

• A free first week: 1 countdown for 7 days with every holiday template and both widget types, then a paywall.
• Three options in RevenueCat: monthly ($2.99 / 14.99 zł), yearly with a 3-day trial as the default ($9.99 / 39.99 zł) and pay once ($14.99 / 59.99 zł).
• Premium as ongoing value: new seasonal themes and templates as they arrive. The one-time option is called “Pay once”, never “lifetime”.

Result: So far, 2 people are on a free trial, on the way to paying.

Built with: RevenueCat · PostHog · Figma

• SEO pages for the big days (Christmas, Halloween, Hanukkah, New Year, Thanksgiving, Valentine's Day) with a live countdown that leads to the app.
• A landing page on Vite and Vercel in English and Polish, with privacy, terms and support pages.
• Analytics from day one: PostHog events for onboarding, templates, the paywall, purchases and widgets.

Result: Live on the App Store since 21 Oct 2026, with the landing page and 6 SEO pages at countfie.com. 40 users on day five after release.

Built with: Vite · Vercel · PostHog · FigJam

• Studio ops pulls data through API keys from App Store Connect, PostHog and Meta Ads into one place.
• Every day I check two things: whether any of them reports errors, and where website traffic comes from, search (SEO) or ads.
• Each page of countfie.com shows views, App Store link clicks and click-through rate, so I can see which page sends people to the store.

Result: first days after launch (21–24 Oct): 136 visitors on countfie.com and 14 App Store link clicks, 10.3% of page views. Three quarters of the views went to the Polish page, and none came from search yet.

Built with: App Store Connect API · PostHog API · Meta Ads API

• Within a day, several people in the group offered to test it, and one wrote that with her bad memory it would come in handy.
• One asked for an Android version, the first signal of demand outside iOS. I logged it for later instead of building it now.
• Messages after the first try praised the visuals (“great graphics, I really like it”) and the need itself (“I was looking for something like this”).

• Recruiting inside the app: a short prompt will ask for 15 minutes of the user's time in exchange for a year of Premium.
• Goal: 5 contextual interviews with people who already use Countfie.
• What I want to learn: what happens at the paywall, and whether the app gives enough value to pay for.