fcus

a minimalist productivity app that keeps you hooked

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Inspiration

I've been searching and searching for productivity apps all my life, but never really stuck to one - just wandering around pomorodo timers, really complex gamified productivity apps that never clicked. I just wanted something simple, minimalistic that kept me hooked.

What it does

Basically, the core loop is you learn to get time - the default rate is 1s of free time each 5s, but can be increased through streaks or, crucially, continuously learning for a long period of time uninterrupted, which drastically increase your multiplier up to x3 the standard rate that resets to zero any time you stop. It's designed to be a bit addictive where you can hoard free time and don't want to stop to keep your multiplier. It's simple, has a minimal layout with very little distractions, and does what it's meant to do. You can also practice and review on any topic using AI and earn that way too, to help you comprehend and solve problems. It also doesn't lock you to the platform - you can do something productive off the app and record it into the app, judged using AI. All of this is based on the honor system, helping those who truly do want to improve themselves.

How we built it

We used Google's AI Studio with a React base and Tailwind CSS for the main stack, utilizing Firebase for user data storage and syncing as well as the Gemini API using gemini 3.1 flash-lite for speed and efficiency of cost. All of the UI/UX design was designed beforehand by me and prototyped before I asked the AI to recreate it due to AI's inherent inability to design.

Challenges we ran into

Some of the problems were the timer not syncing/counting when the user switched tabs and AI's notorious inability to design. We resolved it by researching the modules ourselves to guide the AI and also designed all the UI ourselves for it to be clean and minimal.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We built the app really quickly in a sprint and learnt a workflow to effectively code and ship using AI tools to accelerate the building process. In total, over 300 hours of work time across all our users have been spent on the app with it only having launched for a week or so.

What's next for fcus

Making it completely open-source, monetizing it with donations or subscriptions (no ads per our commitment to, you know, focus - all money coming back into the project to fund API costs) and enhancing it with more features, perchance AI chat or an enhanced time earning system and implementing user feedback. We also plan to do a more widespread launch further down the line and promoting it more.

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