Leila Khanova

I am Leila, and I make Mini Loops, an iPhone app for building one daily habit at a time.

The whole thing came out of noticing that I had abandoned about four habit trackers, and that every time the app was what ended it rather than the habit. You fill in eight habits, have one bad week, lose the streak, and stop opening it.

So Mini Loops holds one habit until it is steady and has no counter of any kind. No streaks, no percentages, no score. You set the habit, the moment in your day it follows, and a smaller version to fall back on when the day falls apart. It asks two questions a day. When the same obstacle keeps turning up it says what it noticed and proposes one change, which you accept or decline. Nothing changes on its own.

The trade I keep having to defend: everything stays on the phone, no account and no server, which also means no sync, no backup and no export. Delete the app and the history goes with it, because I never had a copy of it.

I've always struggled with promoting my own work. It always felt a little awkward because I grew up in an environment where drawing attention to yourself wasn't really encouraged.

That's not exactly ideal when you're trying to build a business, and even less so when marketing is literally how you make a living. :D

In the month that I've been here, I've been noticing a pattern in a lot of launches - strong demos, polished UI, clear outputs of "what it does."

But when I ask myself "What problem does this solve?" I sometimes have to dig for the answer. (I come by that thinking honestly - I've spent 33 years building and fixing businesses, so this is the lens I can't turn off.)