Why I Built It
For 99 days in a row I walked a minimum of 30 minutes. Heavy rain, blowing snow, injury, and even sheer laziness did not stop me from my daily walks. Something drove me to just show up.
Warming myself at my favorite coffee shop with an Americano, I considered the last 99 days and if I wanted to continue to day 100. This +1 more day is of course just an arbitrary number, but it is an appropriate point to contemplate the experience so far and decide “what’s next?” For 99 days I lived the life of someone who walks every day. The experience, in its entirety, became my reference point for deciding whether I was going to adopt the habit as part of who I am.
The moment was powerful and personal, filled with agency for what was next. I decided I wanted to share the process I used to get to that moment. You don’t need an app for the experience, but I wish I had one to look back and review my past thoughts and experiences over those 99 days of walking.
I have since used the 99 day threshold to experiment with new habits that have led to significant changes to my life. I seek to understand “What’s it like to be a person who shows up every day?” Is there something that I can take from that experience? Even if I don’t fully commit to it after my experiment.
I made the 99DaysOf app to help others gain similar experiences with their own experiments. The app was designed to serve a single purpose and then get out of the way as quickly as possible; leaving a history for later reflection.
99DaysOf
99DaysOf.com is available as a paid web application. It comes with a 100-day, no-questions-asked refund — one click and you’re done. Try it for 99 days, then decide: make it a daily practice, drop it completely, or something in between.
Like every application I build, privacy is at the forefront. All the data is encrypted. And absolutely no data sharing on the actual application. I don’t even use analytics with 99DaysOf.
What I Learned
The original version was created to be free, private, using only your own browser’s local storage. After a couple of test users lost data, I decided to make it a proper database-backed web application. Doing so also opened up the option of usiąng it on multiple devices. Adding a database meant my costs were no longer basically zero. As a result I charge $9 a year which helps cover costs and works as a decently effective tool for keeping bots away — the ones that like to fill up databases for fun and no profit.