Debrief to pre-launch in 24 hours: the story of Repeat Sleep
My friend told me her idea. I prototyped it and launched a landing page within the span of 24 hours.
My friend is a Doctor who specializes in sleep disorders.
Her idea is an app that makes your sleep routine.
I spent an hour writing my thoughts, exploring concepts stolen from other apps and from video games.
I spent another hour thinking of a name for the app. Most of the names were already taken, at least the domains were.
I took my dog for a walk, and came upon a great name, whose domain was available: Repeat Sleep and RepeatSleep.com
I bought the domain.
The logo followed naturally, as ‘zzz’ is synonymous with sleep, and the repetition of the ‘z’ aligns perfectly with the name.
I spent a few hours prototyping the portion of the app that a user might first experience after downloading: the onboarding portion.
For this I used Framer X.
So now I have a domain name and an interactive prototype.
I still need a landing page for the domain, and a way to collect emails so my friend can accrue a list of interested beta testers.
My go-to email hosting company is Mailchimp.
After subscribing, I want a welcome email to automatically be sent with a link to a single-question survey.
My go-to survey and form builder is Typeform.
I want to track behavior on the landing page.
My go-to behavioral analytics too is Hotjar.
With all this setup, I felt comfortable writing the HTML and CSS for the landing page.
My text editor of choice is currently Visual Studio Code.
After adding the necessary script for Hotjar, and using the Mailchimp link, my landing page was ready for hosting.
The service that makes it easy for me to instantly upload a folder to the internet is Netlify, specifically Netlify Drop.
The final step was to connect my domain with the website I created.
This required changing DNS nameservers with the company I purchased the domain name through, Name.com.
With that, Repeat Sleep became a real thing.
