The Social Fall, The Bird Rise

It was 5-ish in the morning and the Alexa in our bedroom was pulsing that eerie orange light. Usually, that means a notification is pending (or it’s trying to sell me a bird feeder it predicted I’d buy soon).

I mumbled, “Alexa, read my notifications.”

It was a message from our niece saying she missed us. Leandra woke up, eyes wide, and immediately bought a flight ticket to Brazil.

That effective, unplanned wake-up call was the spark. We thought that experience was something worth repeating. We wanted to wake up surprised by messages from friends, family, loved ones.

The Rabbit Hole of Doubts

The initial idea was an app to help us do exactly that. A social alarm where people could record secret messages for you to wake up to. We toyed with it, recording silly messages for each other. It was cute. But then came the questions.

• Is there anyone else in the galaxy who wants this?
• How do we test it without spending months building it?
• Will anyone pay for this?
• Is it really more effective than a regular alarm?
• Does Apple allow dynamic alarm sounds? (Yes, but it’s a nightmare, by the way).
• How do we handle the privacy of people’s recordings? Or unwanted people recording messages for you?
• What happens if you have no friends recording messages? (That one hit close to home).

…and a rabbit hole of other doubts.

Testing the “Social” Hypothesis

We were so sure we were onto something.

But surprisingly, we did what product-centric people usually don’t do. We ran Facebook ads to test the idea before building it. We compared the “Social Alarm” against a few control groups: “Alarm with Quotes”, “Alarm from your Future Self”, “Alarm with a Sexy Voice”, and… “Alarm with Birds”.

I was actually rooting for the Future Self idea as well. (I have weird needs, I know). I was also super excited that we found some evidences that human voices and variability on alarm sounds are more effective than just a regular alarm sound. So my two favorite ideas were super aligned with that.

While the ads burned money, I built an MVP to test the technical waters. I tried Flutter first because I wanted to be lazy and have one codebase for iOS and Android, and had kind of a blast working with FlutterFlow for SF2.LA, so why not going to it’s parent technology. It didn’t go well. The libraries weren’t there, and it felt like I was fighting the framework more than building an app.

So I ditched the cross-platform dream and went native iOS. Suspecting that now with AI Coding Assistants, it’d be easier to maintain two good codebases. By the way, because these coding assistants are so good, I don’t believe anymore in any cross-platform solution.

The ad results came back. Neither the Future Self idea nor the Social Alarm set the world on fire.

I also talked to someone who had tried it in 2014 and failed. They faced many problems and ended up pivoting to a different idea. Found other people who tried in 2023, and failed again.

I thought people wanted to wake up to friends.
I was wrong.

We were confused. The winner was Bird Alarm… but the iPhone already has a default bird sound. Why would anyone download an app for that?

I’m a bit anti-social, so I ironically crave those planned, safe moments of listening to loved ones. When I get a voice message from a friend, I wait for the perfect moment to listen to it. I assumed everyone else was the same, lonely in the crowd, starving for a voice. But maybe I was misreading the room. Maybe “social” has become a job. A performance. Something you check before bed and doom-scroll through. The last thing people wanted was to “login” to another social interaction the second they opened their eyes. They didn’t want connection. They wanted peace.

We shelved the whole thing. I still tried to launch my “Future Self” alarm anyway, the code was ready. Apple rejected it. I changed the approach. Apple rejected it again. They were nailing the coffin on this idea for me. But, they gave up on rejecting me, and approved it. Still, the solution I got seemed one of a kind gohorsing style, if you know what I mean. I called the app Memo Rise, a mix of Memo app and alarm. I consider this app just an MVP, still needs a lot of work, but somehow, there are some “visionaries” paying for it.

The Second Chance

Six months later, Leandra told me to stop messing around with coding games and revisit our list of “serious” ideas. We looked at the alarms again.

We’ve spent the last years trying to build things that improve our daily habits. The questions are always the same.

• Is there anything I do daily that I can make better?
• What is bothering me the most every day?

We looked at the bird data again because people wanted it. We wanted something to improve our wake-up ritual, and we love birds.

So we decided to give it a shot. I already had the Memo Rise code rotting in a folder somewhere, so adapting it to play bird sounds wasn’t a huge leap.

Becoming Bird People

The funny thing is, the more we worked on it, the more we fell in love with it. I didn’t start this project excited, but somewhere between finding the right Song Thrush audio and debugging audio sessions, I got hooked.

We started watching documentaries. We became obsessed by Cornell University, they are simply the masters of bird-related projects, they have so many, with millions of visits per month. The Guardian recently talked about their bird identification app Merlin. We started identifying birds on our walks. We became those people who point at a tree and whisper, “White-throated Sparrow” (my favorite, for now).

So here we are. Bird Rise. It’s one more little product we’re proud of. Maybe the one we’re most proud of, actually. It connects us a bit better with nature, and it’s not just another AI wrapper looking for a problem to solve. And that feels like a win already.