Moment

The Story

In December of 2013, I started on a side project called Moment which would end up being the work I’m most proud of in my career. My idea was to track the time I spent on my phone in an effort to control my addiction to this brick of glass. I was spending my days on it for work, and then would spend hours on it in the evening hunting down little hits of dopamine on Instagram and Reddit. I built this product for myself because I needed it.

[ Photo of my office in Crafton, with my dogs under my feet ] After 6 rejections from Apple, V1.0 launch on X

[ Screenshot of V1.0 ] Looking back, it was the perfect V1.0: utilitarian and functional (AKA ugly and I’m embarrassed to post this 🙈)

[ Download #s graph ]

TechCrunch, NY Times, Today Show

Quitting my full time freelance career

Three years, many different hats (iOS engineer/designer/marketing/business person). Working from an RV and traveling [ Photo of different worksites ]

[ Download #s graph ] Caption with daily downloads

Moment started to grow beyond what I could handle. I needed help. Customer service emails by themselves were half of my day.

Tim buying Moment, office in Burlingame (although still a remote company) [ Photo of Tim and I outside office ] CNN article of Tim and I

Hiring engineering/design team guided by Aubrey Kendall

• Most talented team I’ve ever worked with overall. More about them. [ photo of entire team ]

June 2018

[ Screenshot of Apple presentation ] Screen Time released by Apple, building in the core of what Moment did into iOS for everyone to use, and on by default. For the whole of Apple’s customers, this is a tremendous thing and why I built Moment in the first place. But for Moment itself, it started the decline.

[ Download #s graph ] Caption with daily download changes

Kerfuffle with Apple and rejections, then a shoutout from Phil Schiller in an official Apple PR statement [ Apple PR Statement ]

We pivoted and went into more of a research bent (what features/approaches really do clinically reduce screen time overuse)

The End

Overall download numbers. 40% US. At its peak, one out of every X adults in the USA was using Moment on iOS. 157 iOS releases of the app over X years, 1599 pushes to the production server

Shutting down Moment in 2021 Sappy concluder

My Role

I was a one person show for the first 5 years. I did the design, development, system administration, marketing, and business operations. Even all of the customer service (15,000+ email responses). I supported a userbase of about 2.5 million active users.

After Moment was acquired in 2018, we hired a larger team where I lead the design and engineering team. I also contributed to some of the evolving product direction.

Proud moments

DHH tweet App of the Day All of the press logos