Hi, I'm Matt.
The Buddy System isn't a startup. It's five apps built by me, an engineering PhD student at the University of Tennessee, who kept wanting tools that didn't exist and eventually got tired of waiting for someone else to make them.
Why these five
Every one of them started as a thing I wanted for myself and couldn't buy. A tea journal that understood a gongfu session is eight steeps and not one cup. A coffee log that would tell me what my best brews had in common instead of what a barista on YouTube thought. A body-transformation tracker that couldn't shame me for missing a Tuesday. A ninety-day planner with room for exactly two goals. A reading journal that was a journal, not a leaderboard.
So they're all shaped by the same bias: record what actually happened, then let the app find the pattern later. None of them try to be a social network, and none of them will ever tell you that you've broken something.
Where your money goes
In roughly this order:
- Apple's Developer Program. $99 a year, before a single app is downloaded.
- This domain and the hosting behind the web apps, which is the whole reason the web version is a subscription and the iPhone version isn't.
- Payment processing. Stripe takes a percentage plus a fixed fee off every transaction.
- Whatever's left goes to tuition. A PhD stipend is a real thing, and so is the gap between it and what a semester costs.
There's no investor to pay back, no growth team, no advertising budget, and no plan to sell any of this to anyone. That isn't a marketing position, it's just what happens when a project is one person's evenings.
One more honest thing about the price. I notice I take things more seriously once I've paid for them, even a little. Free apps I download, open twice and forget. The ones I paid five dollars for, I actually use. That isn't why these cost money (the list above is), but it's why I've stopped feeling bad that they do.
What that buys you
Being small is the reason the apps can be the way they are:
- No accounts on iPhone. Nobody is asking me to collect emails for a funnel, so I don't.
- No analytics SDK, no ads, no data sale. Your journal is on your device. I've never seen one and I've built it so I can't.
- Bought once, not rented. The App Store apps are $5 and stay bought. I'd rather sell you the thing than lease it to you.
- A person reads the support email. It's me. Sometimes slowly, but it's me.
If you want to help
Honestly, the most useful things are free:
- Buy the app you'd actually use. One you open is worth more to me than three you don't.
- Leave a review. For an app with no marketing budget, App Store reviews are the entire marketing budget.
- Tell me when something's broken. I can't test on every device, and the bug you shrug off is one nobody else has reported.
And if you've already bought an iPhone app and want to take a web subscription too, purely to chuck something at the tuition, that's a genuinely kind thing to do and I won't pretend otherwise. It isn't necessary and you shouldn't feel any pressure. But people ask, so: yes, that helps, and thank you.
Thanks for reading this far.
Matt
Start with whichever one you'd open tomorrow
That's the whole trick. One small app, one thing you already do.