Make the invisible visible.

The problem

Small wins are the whole game.

Apollo grew straight out of Strata. While I was designing that gamified habit builder, I realized the word “habit” had become a buzzword, one that sounded good but never translated into quality. So I went looking for a sharper idea, and I found it in winning. A Harvard study by Teresa Amabile, built on nearly 12,000 daily diaries, found that of all the things that boost motivation and emotion in a day, the single most important is making progress in meaningful work, even a small step forward. Small wins are not a nice-to-have. They are the whole game.

This one is personal. I have ADHD, and I have always seen it as a superpower, it lets me lock in completely on the things I love, and it fuels a drive most people do not have. But the hardest part of building anything is the middle: the slow, unglamorous stretch between starting and finishing, where the reward feels furthest away. My friends swear they will be jacked in a couple of months, and they mean it, but results never come overnight, and all the quiet showing-up in between goes unseen. Apollo is built to make that middle visible, and worth staying in. And for a lot of people, the stakes run higher than a missed month at the gym.

Research & ideation

Everyone wanted it to be social.

While building Strata, I ran 30 user interviews, and one request kept surfacing: people wanted a social layer. They wanted to stack their wins together. That stuck with me, because I already feel it myself, I love posting online just to watch how my friends react, and most of us already share stories all day long. Apollo takes that instinct and gives it an intentional home: one place, made only for your wins.

The deeper bet is that witnessing beats willpower. When you watch your friends show up, showing up becomes contagious, and being seen doing the work makes you want to keep doing it, for the people watching as much as for yourself. No streak counter can do that.

The design

The camera captures the feeling, not the angle.

The whole app is one loop. You capture a win with Apollo’s own camera, and your wins come together into a single, beautiful post, a mosaic of your day, that your friends witness and react to. Over time it becomes a personal journal of who you were becoming, one day at a time.

I kept the camera restrained on purpose. Apollo is a close-friends app, and it has to breed authenticity the whole way through. A camera roll would mean uploading your most posed, best-angle shot, but a win is about the feeling, not the perfect frame. So you shoot in the moment, with rule-of-thirds guides and framing help so it still comes out looking its best. The instant you log a win, you feel it: this photo is going to become something gorgeous, for you and for the people watching.

The screens in these flows, the camera and the core app, began at a 24-hour hackathon where I designed the first version of Apollo end to end in a single day. I have kept redesigning and pushing every one of them further since.

The camera is the screen I am proudest of. The latest pass makes capturing a win feel effortless, a couple of taps and you are done.

From the 24-hour hackathon

North

North gives. It never nags.

One more piece makes the loop feel personal. North is a small AI companion built into Apollo, the closest thing to a coach for your wins. Each day it looks at what you have been capturing and reflects it back to you: the patterns it notices, the progress you are making, a gentle observation to start your morning. I wanted North to genuinely help people build momentum, never to nag them into it, so I brought in a friend studying psychology to shape its voice, ADHD-friendly, encouraging, a little funny, with real character. Just as important, North never pretends to be human. It is always, clearly, an AI, because research on AI companions shows people trust an assistant more when it is honest about being a tool than when it fakes being a person.

Designed for ADHD

Designed for the way ADHD brains work.

Because I designed Apollo from the inside, the ADHD-native thinking lives in the design, not just the marketing. There are no follower counts and no leaderboards, nothing that turns showing up into a number you can lose or a ranking to climb.

From launch to profile, Apollo holds one calm, grayscale world, and that is a deliberate ADHD decision. ADHD brains run on dysregulated dopamine, which makes them the most vulnerable to the bright, saturated colors, red most of all, that apps weaponize to trigger a hit and pull attention. So there is no red anywhere, and no color at all in the interface: the only color in Apollo is your own photos. Research on grayscale interfaces shows it measurably lowers compulsive screen use, and here it means nothing ever has to compete with the wins.

The dark, luxurious mood came out of experimentation. I was chasing the feeling of a place like Equinox, premium, quiet, considered, and the entire look grew out of the logo, which I designed first. The dark does not just help ADHD focus, it makes Apollo feel like something worth keeping.

Where it stands today

HomeCameraFeedFind

The redesign

Refining the hackathon designs.

All of that thinking had to survive contact with a real screen. Here are three places where the redesign changed how Apollo actually feels to use, and why each one matters.

Redesign

The feed

The old feed was always open, the same all-day scroll every other app runs on. That is the trap: social feeds reward you on a variable schedule, so the brain keeps firing in anticipation and never settles, the loop that hits ADHD brains hardest. So wins stay locked until sunset, when everyone’s unlock at once. Trading an unpredictable pull for one fixed daily moment turns checking into a ritual, not a compulsion.

Before

The always-open feed: an all-day scroll.

After

Wins unlock once, at sunset. Checking becomes a ritual.

Redesign

The camera

I gave the viewfinder the whole screen so capturing a win feels cinematic, not clerical. Flash and rotate move to the edges within easy thumb reach, so nothing competes with the shot at the moment that matters.

Before

The viewfinder shared the screen with chrome.

After

Full-screen viewfinder, controls at the thumb edges.

Redesign

Connect becomes Find

Connect was a bare utility for adding people. Find does that and more: it surfaces albums of wins curated to you, opens friends’ profiles, handles requests, and puts settings one tap away, one hub instead of a single-purpose screen.

Before

Connect was a bare list for adding people.

After

One hub: albums, profiles, requests, and settings.

Outcome

The one I built for me.

I love working on a team, helping a group understand each other and build one unified experience. But Apollo proved something I needed to prove to myself: that I can carry an entire product, every flow, every screen, every decision, on my own. It is the passion project I actually wanted to use, and building it strengthened every part of being a designer for me.

The best part is still showing it off, watching a friend or my family react to a screen, taking the feedback, and pushing it further. Apollo is still in progress, and I am continuing to design and iterate. If you want to see where it stands today, reach out and I will walk you through it.