After a few years (2008-2012) of working mostly on SimplyTweet since going indie, I’ve been doing some retainer work, building apps and backend services for other other people as well as some exploration on my own. I’ve had a bit of time to think about what to do next.

My days of building the core of a product totally under a third party’s control – SimplyTweet relied heavily on Twitter – is over. In addition to the numerous unknowns about where the third party’s production direction might be, the lack of control – in many cases – forces less than desirable product decision in my own product. As an indie, there’ll have to be extreme focus and scoping of features to make this a reality. Marco Arment’s Instapaper is a great example of this. Both the backend service as well as the user-facing frontend – which consist of the instapaper.com website and the iOS app – are both built, owned and operated by him [1].

Another factor I considered is that it should be an unlikely product to be sherlocked.

It has to be a product I would use myself regularly as a consumer, preferably not a fad.

I’ve been intrigued by the theme of rememberance for sometime now, and while some aspects of a product around it are run by startups that might come and go – think locations/checkins with Foursquare, blogging with Blogger/WordPress, social networks with Path/Facebook and numerous photography related products – the core theme isn’t going away.

The basic tenet of recording our thoughts, our lives and experiences aren’t going away. Based on this ideas, I’ve been working on shipping my new iOS app “Everyday” for the past few months. It’s a private journal for recording your throughts and experiences. The version submmited to Apple for review is still barebones at the moment, but I plan to write more about it as I work on evolving it.

Update Oct 30: Everyday Journal has now been released and is available on the app store.

[1] Marco Arment sold the entire Instapaper product in 2013.