Forward, an iOS app for @packslight

Preview of our application
Pomodoro-style timer to complete microactions

About the project

Inspiration

We built Forward for the RevenueCat Shipyard Creator Contest after noticing a pattern in Gabby Beckford’s community: her content creates real momentum, but many followers still pause right before the first step. Not because they lack ambition, but because the goals are huge, the path is unclear, and the emotional support system ends when the video ends.

Gabby’s brief framed it perfectly: people are not waiting for desire, they are waiting for permission. Forward is our attempt to turn that waiting into action.

What we learned

Motivation is fragile when the first step is vague. The same goal feels doable when it becomes a checklist of tiny wins.
Commitment beats inspiration. A user making an explicit promise to themselves changes the tone from browsing to doing.
Paywall timing matters. If the value is clear, a hard paywall after onboarding can outperform soft gating because the user understands what they are buying.

A simple way to think about it is reducing the psychological distance between a dream and a daily task:

Activation ∝ (Clarity × Momentum) / Overwhelm

So the product job is to increase clarity and momentum while aggressively shrinking overwhelm.

How we built it

Forward is a React Native + Expo app built as a polished MVP with a tight loop between onboarding, planning, and execution.

Flow

Apple Sign-In to start quickly
Onboarding that anchors the experience in Gabby’s tone and social proof
Goal input (financial, travel, confidence, career)
Micro-action plan generation with phased steps
Commitment signature where the user signs a promise to themselves
Paywall (RevenueCat) before the main app
Daily dashboard of scheduled micro-actions, streaks, badges, and celebration

Architecture

We kept routing intentionally simple. No navigation library. App.tsx acts as the state machine that decides which screen to show (login → onboarding → paywall → main app). This reduced edge cases and helped us ship faster.

Scheduling engine

The scheduler distributes micro-actions across the goal’s date range. Tasks are grouped into phases like Research → Plan → Execute → Maintain, then spaced proportionally so the user gets the right difficulty at the right time. We debounced persistence to avoid hammering storage during rapid UI updates.

RevenueCat

We implemented RevenueCat via a custom hook (useRevenueCat) that:

Configures the SDK on launch
Fetches offerings and parses plans into UI-ready cards
Listens for real-time entitlement changes
Supports purchase and restore flows
Gates the app based on a single entitlement flag

We built a custom paywall UI instead of using hosted UI so the design matched the PacksLight brand and we could highlight the annual plan as the default best value.

Challenges we faced

Designing warm gamification without feeling childish. The audience is ambitious and adult, so we used subtle celebration, clean progress rings, and badges that feel like identity, not stickers.
Making AI planning feel trustworthy. We avoided generic advice by using curated task libraries per goal type, then scheduling those tasks intelligently instead of inventing everything from scratch.
RevenueCat edge cases. Handling cancelled purchases versus real errors, plus restore flows, needed careful UX so users never felt blocked without explanation.
Shipping under hackathon time pressure. A single-screen state machine architecture helped us avoid navigation complexity and focus on the core loop.

Result

Forward turns Gabby’s inspiration into a structured daily system: tiny actions, visible progress, and a premium model that supports a sustainable creator business. The goal is simple: stop waiting, start moving, and keep moving tomorrow.