How I’m Building KAVYLO Alongside a Full-Time Job, University and Everyday Life

When you see an app in the App Store, you usually only see the finished product.

You don’t see the hours behind it.

You don’t see the discarded ideas, bugs, testing or the nights when “I’ll just finish one more thing” suddenly turns into several more hours of work.

That is a big part of the story behind KAVYLO.

I’m building KAVYLO alongside a full-time job, university and my normal everyday life.

And there isn’t a large team behind the app splitting development, marketing, product management and communication between different people.

Right now, I handle a lot of it myself.

From an idea to a real app

KAVYLO started with the idea of bringing different areas of fitness together in one place.

Training doesn’t exist in isolation.

Planning, progress, nutrition, recovery and personal data all influence each other.

The basic idea was relatively easy to define.

Turning that idea into an actual working product was something completely different.

An idea can be explained in a few minutes.

A real product is built from hundreds of smaller decisions.

How should a feature work?

What does the user actually need?

What can be removed?

What happens when data is missing?

How should something work across iPhone, Apple Watch, widgets and other parts of the app?

And how do all of these features still feel like one coherent product?

Those questions have become part of my everyday life.

KAVYLO often starts after the normal workday ends

I work full time.

At the same time, I’m studying.

And somewhere between those two things, KAVYLO is being built.

That means I can’t wake up every morning and spend the entire day working exclusively on my app.

Quite often, the real work on KAVYLO starts after a normal workday is already finished or after other responsibilities are done.

Sometimes that means working on a feature in the evening.

Sometimes it means spending part of the weekend on the app.

And there have been nights when I slept far less than I should have because I wanted to fix one more bug or finally finish a feature.

That isn’t something I want to turn into a permanent routine.

Building a fitness app that takes recovery seriously while constantly ignoring sleep myself would be slightly ironic.

But those nights are still part of the story of building KAVYLO.

App development is only one part of it

When I say I’m building KAVYLO, I don’t just mean writing code.

Of course, a large part of my time goes into technical development.

I plan new features, build them, test them and improve existing areas.

Then a bug appears.

Or something works technically but still doesn’t feel right for the user.

Or one small idea suddenly creates five more tasks.

At the same time, I work on marketing, social media, copy, translations, product decisions, user feedback and the long-term positioning of KAVYLO.

On one evening, I might start by working on a technical feature.

Then I write a social media post.

After that, I respond to feedback.

Then I go back to testing the app.

And at some point, I realize that the one hour I originally planned has turned into much more.

Doing almost everything yourself changes how you see the product

Of course, it would be easier to have a different person responsible for every area.

But handling so much myself also teaches me an incredible amount.

When I make a technical decision, I can directly see how it affects the user experience.

When I talk about KAVYLO on social media, I learn which topics people are interested in.

When someone gives feedback, it reaches me directly.

There aren’t five departments in between.

That allows KAVYLO to evolve quickly.

Some ideas work exactly as I imagined.

Others don’t work at all.

Some features get redesigned.

Others disappear completely.

I no longer see that as failure.

It is simply part of building a product.

There is no perfect time to start

With a full-time job, university and everyday responsibilities, it would have been very easy to say:

I’ll start later.

After university.

When I have more time.

When life gets quieter.

The problem is that there would probably always be another reason to wait.

So I started even though the conditions weren’t perfect.

That makes the process harder sometimes.

But it is also the reason KAVYLO exists today.

KAVYLO is far from finished

I don’t see the current version of KAVYLO as the final product.

There are still many features, ideas and improvements I want to build.

At the same time, I don’t want to simply put as many features as possible into one app.

KAVYLO should help people understand their training and the factors surrounding it.

The app shouldn’t simply display data.

It should help people understand what that data means for their training, progress and recovery.

That is what I’m continuing to build.

After work.

Alongside university.

On weekends.

Sometimes later at night than I originally planned.

And step by step, the idea I once had is becoming more and more like the product I imagined.