The smallest app worth building.

Every app idea arrives as a list of features. The founder's document has twelve. The steering committee adds six. By the time it ships, eighteen mediocre features compete for a home screen icon that gets deleted in a week. The apps people keep do the opposite: one job, done so well it feels obvious.

Find the Tuesday-morning job

Ask: what will a real person open this app to do on an ordinary Tuesday morning? Not the vision — the habit. For a clinic app we shipped, the answer was "check when my appointment is." Booking, reminders, records — everything else earned its place by serving that one repeated moment. Features that didn't serve it waited, most of them forever.

Cut until it hurts, then once more

The test for every feature in v1: if we cut this, does the Tuesday job still work? If yes, cut it. You can always add later — with real usage data telling you what to add. You can never un-ship the confusion of a cluttered first impression, and the app stores don't give second first-impressions.

Prototype like you're trying to kill it

Before writing production code, put a clickable prototype in front of five real users and watch — don't guide, watch. Where they hesitate is your redesign list. What they ignore is your cut list. If they don't reach for it twice in a week, that's not a design problem; that's the market answering early, cheaply, and honestly. Two weeks of prototyping regularly saves a quarter of building the wrong thing.

Ship, watch, sharpen

Launch is the start of the useful data, not the end of the work. The 4.8-star apps get there by shipping a sharp v1 and iterating on what people actually do — not what the roadmap predicted eight months earlier.