I’m excited to announce the launch of BestSelfApp, a new iOS/Android app that I’ve created with Ryan Moseley. BestSelfApp is designed to help you get what you want out of life by discovering what habits help or hinder your success, empowering you to make better choices, and live up to your potential more days.
The idea for BestSelfApp came from a feature I found incredibly useful in another app I’ve used for years—Sleep Cycle. It has a nice tagging system that lets you track factors like taking melatonin, having a morning workout, or a late night snack, and then shows how these things impact your sleep score. That insight—being able to see actual percentages and metrics on how much each factor was helping or hurting my sleep—was the spark behind BestSelfApp. I wanted to take that concept and expand it to benefit your whole life, not just your sleep, by measuring how all these daily habits contribute to your overall success in life, based on your own personal definition of what success means to you.
Surely, you want a lot of things out of life— a great career, business, relationship, or just living with more purpose and happiness. But to achieve any of that, you have to take care of yourself first. You are at the center of everything you hope to accomplish. It’s not just about charging toward your goals, it’s about making sure you’re in the best possible shape—physically, mentally, and emotionally—so you have the strength and energy to reach them. Johann Hari’s words capture this idea perfectly and have inspired me in my own journey.
“If you’re driving down the highway and someone dumps a bucket of mud on your windshield, it doesn’t matter where you are going; you have to drop what you’re doing and clean your windshield. The first thing we need to do is deal with the underlying factors that are robbing us of achieving our potential. It’s a first order crisis because if we don’t deal with this one, we can’t deal with any of the others.”
I don’t know about you, but I’ve got some mud on my windshield. It’s easy to get caught up in the grind and keep moving forward without really seeing what’s pushing us forward or holding us back. Personally, I know there are things in my life that are obstacles—some are obvious, while others might be more subtle. I’m far from perfect, and I know I haven’t lived up to my potential. But I think that’s something we can all relate to—the feeling that we haven’t fulfilled what we were supposed to, that we’ve let our habits, distractions, and tendencies take us off course. I created this app to better understand how my daily choices shape my life and to help me live more intentionally.
I put a lot of time and effort into creating this app. Getting an app polished enough for real users is no small feat; it takes persistence and attention to detail to turn an idea into something that people can actually use. If you decide to try it out, it would mean a lot to me. After all, one of the best compliments I could receive is seeing people engage with something I’ve built and finding value in it. The app is currently 100% free, and our focus right now is on gathering feedback and seeing how people engage with it.
And the builder in me can’t help but mention what we used to build this. The back end is 100% serverless in AWS, using the Serverless Framework, Lambda, Node.js, API Gateway, EventBridge, S3, DynamoDB, ECS Fargate, AWS Batch, SES, Twilio, and Terraform. The front end is built with React Native, and it was our first experience getting a mobile app through the App Store approval process. When we first started this project, we were doing all the coding ourselves. By the end, we had ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot pitching in, making them an essential part of the stack, and part of the team. I now find myself more in the role of an architect and editor, refining and shaping the work, while the LLM handles most of the actual coding.
Creating BestSelfApp has been an incredibly rewarding experience, and I’m excited to see how it evolves with your feedback and engagement. Thanks for reading and for being part of the process!
