You’re probably thinking, “Why yet another tracking app?” Why is the first app every iOS developer builds always some kind of tracking or productivity app? There are already so many.
I didn’t want to build yet another one that tells you what to do. I’ve tried a lot of them and I never manage to fit into their boxes: productivity, habits, tracking, goals, motivation, personal growth… or journaling. I don’t know about you, but I just spill out of the boxes.
So I created an app that feels like me and that I actually need — simple, useful, and human. You won’t get the whole story here, just Act I.
Me, an unimaginative iOS developer?
I’m going to be completely honest with you: I’m not a developer. I had this growing urge to create an app, but no idea what it should be, so I also thought about making a tracking app. But NO way, of course not.
My name is Delphine. Ever since I was a child, one idea has followed me around: helping. For a long time, I imagined myself teaching — until a pre-teaching internship and a job as a middle school supervisor completely turn me off the idea of teaching. Then I tried the entrance exams for social work school — a nice little scam that cost me 500 euros, without me ever finding out why I was rejected. That made me question my real motivation for that path. So I turned toward a career as a Human Resources Manager. I have nothing bad to say about it.
At every turn, the red thread stayed the same: being useful, listening, and supporting. I’ve often listened to other people’s emotions at work without always knowing what to do with my own — and I have a lot of them too. All kinds, all colors, all intensities, and all durations.
Connecting my emotions, my sleep, and my motivation to my mood
This is how I started looking for an app that could go along with my mood shifts and my emotions, that took seriously my need to recentre myself by motivating me, and that encouraged me to take care of myself in a realistic way. The more I got specific about what I wanted:
- simple emotional journaling where I can lay down my thoughts before they turn into an emotional marathon,
- clear and playful tracking of emotions and mood,
- sleep tracking, because its quality has a huge impact on how I feel emotionally,
- and motivation boosts based on my mood to help me bounce back during the day,
— the more obvious it became that a single app focused on just one feature would never be enough. I needed an emotional pocket companion, an emotional support tool that connects all these dimensions without making them more complicated.
Not a medical app. Not a mental health coaching app.
Since nothing ticked all the boxes, I ended up doing the only logical thing: building my own mood-based emotional motivation app using no-code tools.
Emosupport, an emotional motivation app that wants what’s best for you
Then came the moment when I had to give all this a name and a face so it could really exist. A name that hits! It’s enough to make you tear your hair out, with so many good domain names already taken. But in the middle of all that frustration, I stumbled on Emosupport: literally, support for emotions. If that’s not a sign, I don’t know what is.
A logo? An avatar? An image that would embody the emotional support I wanted to share. I love avatars, so that part was obvious. I doodled a heart on the corner of a page. A slightly wonky heart, a bit twisted, a bit inspired by emojis and by our emotions, because the heart is the receptacle of all our emotions.
I took a photo of my sketch and sent it to Chad (ChatGPT). From tweak to tweak, from failed versions to rough attempts, I eventually fell in love with Emosupport’s avatar, whose inspiration appeared at the same time as the logo.
A simple, expressive heart, an avatar refined.
The identity was born.
The rest of Emosupport’s creation story ?
It’s coming in my next post. I’m going to tell you how I am building Emosupport from scratch, with no-code tools, stubbornness, a good dose of elbow grease, and two great sidekicks. We are going to talk about it very soon.
And yes, you are going to be able to judge my technical choices too. I know some people love to hate no-code… Is that your case? Or do you have a favourite technology?