About EstudyLog

I am a huge learner, and I watch a lot of online lectures on YouTube. I actually learned SwiftUI because of Stanford's CS193p — thank you, Paul Hegarty, for those great lectures. Whenever I watched something on YouTube, I always wanted to write notes that I could come back to later — something that would help me remember what I learned and what I did last time. But it did not feel serious enough to use big note-taking apps. What I really wanted was for my notes to be tied to the exact study session when I watched the lecture.

Almost no note-taking app lets you log a study session — when you studied, when you finished, and what you did during that session. For me, association matters a lot. I do not just want random notes; I want to remember them because of the session they came from. So I searched the App Store and online, but I could not find anything like that. Eventually I thought: what if I just make this app myself?

This was during the AI boom, so I thought, "Maybe I can just explain what I want, and one of these AI tools will build it." I tried that, and they did make something, but it was far from what I had in mind. So I started building a prototype myself while learning SwiftUI at the same time. I began with the basics: how views work, how state works, and how the whole system is structured. I already had some background in Python, so I understood programming in general, but Swift was its own story.

At first, I was really frustrated. A lot of the AI-generated prototypes would hit that annoying compiler error: "The compiler is unable to type-check this expression in reasonable time." It also took me a long time to really understand state, bindings, and environments.

So I had no choice but to actually learn this stuff properly. After a while, I had a prototype. But I was not really thinking anyone would like it. I asked a few of my friends to try it, but honestly, nobody cared that much, or maybe the app just was not really their thing.

At the same time, because I wanted to publish it on the App Store one day, I wanted to create a website. That meant I needed a domain name and an actual name for the app. At first, it was just called Study Log. I did not really know what to name it. I thought maybe I would just call it StudyLog, but there was already a website with that name. So I thought, okay, I will add an "E" at the front to make it unique. That is what I did, and that is how the name EstudyLog came about. The "E" is mostly not pronounced, but you can pronounce it however you want.

After buying the domain and creating a simple one-page website, I totally forgot about it and just went back to working on the app. I kept thinking the app was not enough if it was just a timer, or if you could only manually enter when you started and ended a session. In the first version, you could manually set the start and end time. I kept telling myself that this was not really something people would pay for.

So I thought, what if I add some AI feature? That was what was trending back then. I tried to build something where the AI would analyze the user's study sessions, notes, and deadlines, then suggest what they should study based on priority and timing. On paper, it sounded really cool, but I could not make it work. The AI hallucinated badly, made things up, and depended too much on people actually writing notes. I left it there for a while because I was frustrated, and honestly, it was not something I was going to be able to fix by myself.

Then one morning, I saw an email in my company inbox from someone who wanted to use the app, but they said it was not available in their region. The reason was that the app ID I had put on the website was not real yet, because the app was not even on the App Store at that point. So anyone who clicked the App Store page would just get an alert.

That email changed a lot for me. Until then, I was just casually working on something. But now there was an actual person who wanted to try the app. I was super excited and also skeptical at first, like, how did they even find the website? Anyway, I replied to their email, explained the situation, and did everything I could to get a TestFlight build ready, the beta version of the app before releasing it on the App Store.

At that point, all of my focus was on finding out whether the app was actually what this person wanted. Spoiler alert: it was. They loved it, and I saw them using the app almost every day. The interesting part was that they were not using the AI feature or writing notes for each session. They just wanted to know how much they studied every day and track that.

Getting the confidence that my app was going to have at least one real user besides me made me really motivated to do my best and release it on the App Store to see whether anyone else would want to use it too. At first, I only released the app in the Canada App Store, since that is where I live, and, conveniently, where that first user was too.

Nobody really installed the app from Canada, but I still wanted to see how it worked in production. Eventually, I felt confident enough to release it to 15 countries, and that was the moment I started seeing a lot of power users joining the app, especially from Europe, and especially from Germany. That felt amazing. There were a few people using the app almost every day, and almost all of them were mainly using it to track how much they studied.

Because of that, I tried to change the AI feature into something more like a sophisticated spaced-repetition model based on mastery of a topic. To be honest, I did not really know what I was doing. I just built something, removed the old AI feature, and hoped it would be better. It was relatively better, but still, nobody really cared about it. I guess nobody knows what to study better than you do yourself. It also was not very useful unless the user had entered enough data, like topics or deadlines for final exams.

That feature did not last either. After that, I promised myself that I would only build things that I actually understood, things I would personally use, and things I could stand behind. That is how the Insights tab you see right now came to be, and I am really proud of it.

Long story short, a lot of people ended up signing up and using the app. What started as just a learning experience eventually became my main job, and now I spend most of my time working on it.

Writing notes is still, in my opinion, one of the best features in the app, but almost nobody uses it today. I think part of the reason is that the UX is not very good when it comes to showing people how to add notes. In earlier versions, every time you finished a session, the app would ask whether you wanted to add a note or not. But I removed that because I wanted the experience to feel as frictionless as possible.

That was one of the biggest lessons I learned while building EstudyLog: a feature can be genuinely useful and still go almost completely unused if the timing, UX, or framing is off. There is that old 80/20 rule that says most people only end up using a small portion of a product's features, and I think there is a lot of truth to that. A lot of product building is not just about having a good idea. It is about presenting that idea at the right moment, in the right way, with as little friction as possible.

I think that lesson shaped the app more than anything else. Over time, I stopped trying to force features into the product just because they sounded smart or impressive. Instead, I started paying much more attention to what people were actually doing, what they ignored, and what kept bringing them back. In a weird way, that is what EstudyLog became: not just a study app, but also my way of learning how people really use software.

Thanks for reading. If you have a cool app development story or experience of your own, I would love to hear it.

Martma A