Does this sound familiar?

You start the new year off with the best intentions of working hard to hit new goals. “New Year, New Me,” you tell yourself as you wake up on January 1, full of ambition to tackle whatever resolution you’ve set for yourself.

But then February rolls around, and suddenly those ambitious resolutions start to seem less and less appealing. Work has gotten busy, your kids seem to have a new activity every night, and you just don’t have time to do whatever it is you told yourself you’d do this year. By March, your resolutions are all but forgotten.

It’s a cycle many of us have fallen into. Life gets busy, making it hard to stick to a resolution, especially when you’ve set lofty goals.

AccountaBuddy app creators and brothers Dom and Tom fell into this cycle and decided to do something about it.

In Need of

Motivation

Dom and Tom were born and raised in New York City. They work full-time, and each manages a few side hustles. So, to say they’re a little busy is a vast understatement.

Like so many of us, Dom and Tom like setting goals around the new year but often struggle to stick to them. One day, they were talking about how their resolutions were going. They were still committed to reaching them but were having trouble due to jobs, family, and life, in general, getting in the way.

Instead of throwing in the towel and giving up on their resolutions altogether, the brothers worked together to find a way to stick to them. They agreed that having a support system available 24/7 could help encourage and motivate them, even when life felt too busy or overwhelming to worry about their resolutions.

So, they started playing around with the idea of building an app that they could use to track their progress and encourage each other. The concept of AccountaBuddy was born.

Solving an Unsolvable Problem

Once they had the idea for their mobile app, Dom and Tom started researching to see if any apps already existed that would solve their problem. They didn’t find anything, so they decided to build their own.

Dom and Tom decided they needed help building an app, so they met with the Confianz Team. By the time we met the brothers, they had already done their due diligence to ensure there wasn’t another app out there that addressed their challenge.

Then, they came up with some general ideas for how they wanted the app to look and feel. It needed to be highly user-friendly to make it easy for people to check in regularly for motivation and encouragement. They wanted the app to be useful for people to track all kinds of goals without limitations, so it needed to allow users to get creative and set goals for themselves without feeling restricted.

After several discussions between the Confianz team and Dom and Tom, we confirmed the app’s requirements, timing, budget, and technology needs. Then we were ready to get started.

Getting to Work

One of the requirements Dom and Tom had for the AccountaBuddy app was having it ready to launch on New Year’s Eve. That way, the app could reach people just as they were setting their New Year’s Resolutions.

Our initial discussions about AccountaBuddy began in early August 2021, and we signed an agreement to get started in early September. Within two weeks, the project officially kicked off. We estimated that the project would take around four months to complete, which aligned with the targeted goal of launching on New Year’s Eve 2021.

Once we established the requirements and timing, the Confianz team met with Dom and Tom weekly to share our weekly progress and ongoing development. We also used these meetings to demonstrate what we would be working on in the upcoming week and get their feedback.

As with other projects, we continued this process of meeting weekly to give updates and get feedback until we completed development. At that point, we released the app to the client for internal testing before doing a public launch.

Adding Flexibility to a Strict Deadline

The app officially launched in the app stores in mid-January 2022, in time to reach an audience of users who were looking for ways to stay accountable as they made their New Year’s Resolutions.

After launching the app, some bugs needed to be fixed. Part of the app development process with Confianz includes maintaining the app and fixing bugs as they come up. So, we continued to work on these issues so the app can be released to the public in February 2022. At that point, Dom and Tom will start pushing their marketing.

This will be timely, as most people tend to become de-motivated to stick to their New Year’s resolutions by early March. By marketing AccountaBuddy in February and March, Dom and Tom will be able to reach an audience of people who still want to stick to their New Year’s resolutions but are struggling to figure out how.

Even without putting in any marketing efforts, AccountaBuddy has been downloaded by motivated individuals eager to meet their goals.

The reviews that have come in for the app so far are all positive. Users like how easy the app is to use and credit the app with helping them stay accountable to reaching their goals with timely push notifications. They also appreciate the customization options and the ability to find like-minded buddies within the app’s community. The app is currently available for download on the iPhone App Store and Google Play. Users can pay a monthly fee of $3.99 per month or an annual fee of $39.99 per year to get access to all of AccountaBuddy’s features.