Aspire

From dreaming to doing. Aspire uses AI to break big goals into daily micro-actions, with streaks and celebrations that keep you going. Built for ambitious women ready to stop waiting and start living.

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Inspiration

Gabby Beckford's brief hit close to home: "Help ambitious women go from dreaming to doing." Her audience saves travel posts, bookmarks career tips, makes vision boards - but there's a gap between that inspiration and actually taking the first step. They need a tool that turns a big dream into something they can do today.

What it does

Aspire helps ambitious women close the gap between inspiration and action. A user creates a goal like "Visit Japan" or "Negotiate a six-figure salary." AI analyzes the goal and generates a personalized action plan - small, concrete steps like "Research flights to Tokyo" or "Practice salary negotiation scripts." Each day, the user checks off actions, earns XP, builds streaks, and gets celebrated with confetti and also sound effects when a goal is completed.

The app is gamified to drive daily engagement - streaks make you not want to miss a day, XP and levels give a sense of progress, and every celebration is a shareable moment.

How I built it

I built it with Flutter (targeting Android and iOS), Firebase for auth and data, and OpenAI via Firebase Functions for AI-powered action planning. RevenueCat handles subscriptions with a free trial flow that presents premium right after onboarding, when the user is most excited.

The design is inspired by Gabby's brand at packslight.com - warm pinks and magentas, confident typography, and an encouraging tone throughout. Dark mode uses warm purple-black tones instead of pure black.

Challenges I ran into

  • Getting Google Play subscriptions and products to automatically sync with RevenueCat. Setting that up in Google Cloud Console was not easy but I figured it out.
  • Balancing the free tier limits. Too restrictive pushes users away; too generous removes the incentive to upgrade. Landed on 3 active goals with 5 actions each as the sweet spot.
  • Making AI suggestions feel personalized and actionable, not generic. The prompt engineering went through several iterations to match the tone Gabby's audience would respond to.
  • Notification issues with flutter_local_notifications.
  • Avoiding copyright issue on the sound I used for sound effect. To avoid this issue, I used elevenlabs api free tier to generate the sound effect. To be honest, I learned a lot from this project.
  • Choosing the right sound. This one took a while, I generated and listened to many sounds, I couldn't come to a conclusion so I called a lady and asked her to tell me what she thinks for each of the sounds as I played them. I told her to think of them as a celebration sound, the one that sounds better. I played all of them one after the other multiple times and had her rate each of them. Based on the rating, we decided to remove some of them till we found this one.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

  • End-to-end payment integration. Setting up Google Play subscriptions, configuring the service account in Google Cloud Console, and getting it all synced with RevenueCat so premium status updates reactively across the app. It was painful to set up but it works smoothly now. So I'm proud of that.
  • Building a complete, polished app solo in under 3 weeks. Auth, onboarding, AI-powered action planning, gamification, notifications, subscriptions, a landing page.
  • The gamification system genuinely feels motivating. Streaks, XP, levels, confetti, haptics, sound effects on goal completion. Especially sound effects, I smiled so hard when I finally got it working.
  • AI micro-action generation that's actually useful. The Cloud Function takes goal context, existing actions, and even suggests whether to append or replace - so the suggestions feel personalized, not generic.
  • Getting the design in tune with Gabby's brand.
  • The Tip of the Day feature. I'm really proud of this one. I researched the Packslight website, I also checked Gabby's Tweets, I dug into her tweets, down to a few years ago. Some of the tips have an indication that it was authored by her (- Gabby Beckford) while I generated some of them with AI, I didn't mark those ones as authored by her though.

What I learned

  • Free trial + post-onboarding paywall is a powerful combination. Users experience the full app before deciding, and the streaks they build during the trial create natural retention.
  • Gamification isn't just engagement fluff - it fundamentally changes how users relate to their goals. A 7-day streak feels like progress worth protecting.
  • Building for a specific creator's audience (not a generic market) forces better product decisions. Every feature was tested against: "Would Gabby's followers love this?"
  • Generating sound effects with Elevenlabs API. I wrote a Python script for this

What's next for Aspire

  • iOS App Store release of the MVP
  • Friend streaks - Going on a streak with a friend
  • Community features - joint goals, nudge/cheer each other on
  • Analytics dashboard for Gabby to track engagement
  • Integration with Gabby's content (travel guides, career tips linked to relevant goals)

Acknowledgments

Shout out to Success (https://www.tiktok.com/@successmenma) for presenting the demo video and helping pick the celebration sound effect. If you need someone for your next video, reach out to her.

Thanks to everyone who helped along the way, especially the women who tested the app and gave feedback that shaped the final product.

Built With

  • dart
  • dart-mappable
  • firebase-auth
  • firebase-firestore
  • firebase-functions
  • flutter
  • google-play
  • google-sign-in
  • openai-api
  • revenuecat
  • riverpod
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