One Product Did All the Work

Welcome back.

This week is about resisting the spread-thin instinct.

One founder's $600K portfolio turns out to be one app doing nearly all the work, and the AI coding tools you build on just made their pricing a lot less predictable.

Two different lessons, same root: know where your actual weight sits before you spread it around.

Let's get into it.

The Portfolio Myth Dies on the Data

Sebastian Röhl's app portfolio crossed $600K.

The story everyone wants to tell is "build lots of small apps, let the winners compound." The actual numbers say something blunter: HabitKit is basically the entire business. FocusKit, WinDiary, and LiftBear combined are under 1% of revenue.

So the portfolio didn't win. One product did, and the rest were learning projects with a nicer name attached.

HabitKit's contribution-grid screens stacked, the simple UI that built $600K

HabitKit is a visual habit tracker built on a GitHub-style contribution grid. Green for done, gray for missed. That's it. 4.8 stars from 6,630 ratings on iOS. The lesson isn't "ship ten things." It's "ship one thing people open every day, then keep showing up."

It took 2.5 years to reach $10K MRR. Most people quit by month six.

If you're spreading yourself across four half-built apps right now, this is your sign to pick the one with retention and go all in.

Reply and tell me which one you'd cut first.

Five Things Worth your 🕓Time🕓

The agentic pricing reset is done

In a single week at the start of June, Copilot, Cursor, and Devin all moved off flat seat pricing toward metered usage. Copilot rebuilt billing entirely around AI Credits at $0.01 each. If you build on these tools, your costs just became variable.

HabitKit's full revenue breakdown

The $600K teardown behind today's opinion. Worth reading for the honest "one app carried everything" admission most portfolio posts skip.

Copilot's hidden enterprise math

The $39 Enterprise seat isn't the real price. GitHub Enterprise Cloud adds $21, making it $60 effective. Promotional credits through August are masking the true cost. Read your contracts now.

TrustMRR

A directory of verifiable revenue pages. Useful before you cite anyone's "$50K MRR" claim, including in your own marketing.

The We Are Founders Directory

Don't forget to get involved if you're working on something cool. Share it over at directory.wearefounders.uk.

The We Are Founders directory: 24 operator-reviewed tools founders actually use

Teardown: The Whole Product Is a Five-Second Pause

Most screen-time apps are feature arms races. Blocklists, schedules, focus modes, app limits, analytics dashboards. Spool throws nearly all of it out and ships one mechanic instead.

When you try to open an app you've blocked, Spool asks you to say out loud, in five seconds, why. That's it. It records the reason, transcribes it, and lets you through.

Look at what that single feature is doing. It doesn't lecture you or guilt you or slap up a counter of hours lost. It just drops you, the actual person, into the gap between the urge and the tap, the window every other app skips straight past.

Spool's landing page: stop doomscrolling with a five-second voice check-in

Said out loud, "I need to check my notifications" stops sounding like a need and starts sounding like the excuse it is. The friction isn't a lock. It's self-awareness, forced into a moment that's normally too fast to notice.

The lesson for builders: the feature and the value are the same object here. There's no settings maze to hide behind. If the five-second prompt doesn't work, nothing does, so all the product energy goes into making that one moment land instead of spreading thin across twenty features nobody opens.

Most founders add features because shipping feels like progress. Spool's whole bet is that the product gets stronger every time they resist.

In Case You Missed It

Following on from the above, we're happy to announce we've got exclusive access to a dataset from Spool, an iPhone app that records the five-second window between the urge to open a blocked app and actually opening it. 8,667 voice recordings, 193 people.

At signup people name a big problem ("I doomscroll"). In the moment, the reason shrinks to "I want to show my mom a video." You set a goal against the big version and meet it as a small want that never looks like the thing you swore off.

Jump in below. 👇

What 8,667 People Said the Second Before They Picked Up Their Phone

A study of 8,667 voice recordings from Spool caught the exact moment people reached for a blocked app