Stop blaming willpower. Retry is a habit tracker and to-do app that logs daily check-ins and reveals your failure patterns after 7 days — part productivity app, part mystery game.
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Maker
📌
Hello Product Hunt community!
I'm the creator behind retry.
To be honest, this project started from a completely blank page in my life. Not long ago, my plans to relocate to Germany fell through, and the future I had envisioned suddenly disappeared. Sitting back at my desk, staring at my editor, the word I use every day as a developer kept flashing in my mind: retry.
So, I decided to build.
retry is a habit tracker wrapped in a detective mystery game.
The Core Loop: Instead of just checking off boring boxes, you log your daily habits to unlock clues and piece together a crime file.
AI-Validated Cases: To keep the content high-quality and logically sound, I designed an automated pipeline where Gemini and Claude work in tandem—one generates the mystery, and the other rigorously plays and validates the solution.
No Friction: It is built as a PWA (Progressive Web App). Just add it to your mobile home screen to get push notifications—no App Store downloads required.
The app is completely free to use for now (no payments integrated yet). We also have a waitlist set up inside for premium episodes, and we are working hard to translate and expand our English content library.
I would absolutely love to hear your raw feedback:
-How does the detective theme feel for a productivity app?
-What kind of mystery themes or habit categories would you like to see next?
Thank you so much for being a part of my "retry." Let's crack this case together! 🕵️♂️
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honestly love the mystery angle, it's such a clever hook for a habit tracker. one thing though, you should let users tag what triggered a failed check-in, like bad sleep or stress, so the pattern reveal after 7 days actually shows you the why behind the what.
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Maker
@emrekjvj This actually already exists — when you log a check-in as missed or partial, you can tag a reason (bad sleep, stress, whatever it was), and that's exactly what feeds the day-7 breakdown. Honestly, you not running into it is more useful feedback than if it were missing — probably means it's buried too deep in the flow right now. Going to look at surfacing it more clearly, thanks for flagging it!
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The failure pattern angle is genuinely interesting, but seven days feels long to wait for the payoff. What if the app surfaced a small "hint" after day two or three, like noticing you skip mornings on days you sleep in, just enough to keep you hooked while the full picture builds out.
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Maker
@ule882420426780 Really good catch — the 7-day window is partly there because I wanted enough data points before calling something a "pattern" instead of noise, but you're right that it's a long stretch with zero payoff in the meantime. A lightweight early signal around day 2-3 (even just "you've skipped mornings twice after late nights") could keep the loop alive without overselling a conclusion this early. Going to think about how to do that without it feeling like a false pattern. This is exactly the kind of feedback I was hoping to get here, thanks!
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After a week of daily check-ins I got a breakdown showing I skip workouts every Wednesday morning, which was honestly a little too accurate. The mystery angle keeps me curious enough to actually open it.
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Maker
@ekelikilkn72240 Ha, sorry (not sorry) for calling out your Wednesday mornings 😄 That's honestly the reaction I was hoping the reports would get — a little uncomfortable but hard to argue with, since it's your own check-ins telling on you, not some generic tip. Really glad the mystery framing is what's actually pulling you back in day to day, that was the part I was most unsure would land. Thanks for trying it out!
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The failure pattern reveal after 7 days sounds genuinely clever, would love to see you add a weekly recap card that compares my streaks across different habits so I can spot which ones I keep abandoning on the same day of the week.
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Maker
@kadriyeirvowna That's a really clean feature idea, thank you. Right now the pattern report is scoped to one case (habit) at a time, but a cross-habit weekly view is a natural next layer — especially since day-of-week is already something I'm tracking per habit. Comparing streaks side by side to spot the shared drop-off day is a much better lens than what I have now. Adding this to the list, appreciate the specific suggestion!
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the framing of failure as a pattern to decode instead of something to beat yourself up over is such a smart reframe, and surfacing it after exactly a week feels like the right dose of delay before the insight actually lands.
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Maker
@zeliha229593239 Really glad that landed — the reframing is honestly the whole point for me, the pattern format matters way more than the tracking itself. Someone else in the comments felt 7 days was too long to wait, so it's interesting to hear the exact same delay felt earned to you. Might mean the sweet spot differs more by person than I assumed. Thanks for putting into words exactly what I was going for!
Report
The seven-day mystery mechanic is such a clever hook, turning habit tracking into something you actually want to come back to. Whoever decided to frame missed check-ins as clues instead of guilt trips clearly gets how people actually behave.
Report
Maker
@esranldf That was me, for better or worse — I built this because most trackers just guilt-trip you with a streak going to zero, and that never actually changed my behavior, it just made me stop opening the app. Framing a miss as a clue instead of a failure was the one design choice I was most stubborn about keeping, so it means a lot that it reads that way from the outside. Thanks for putting it so well!
honestly love the mystery angle, it's such a clever hook for a habit tracker. one thing though, you should let users tag what triggered a failed check-in, like bad sleep or stress, so the pattern reveal after 7 days actually shows you the why behind the what.
@emrekjvj This actually already exists — when you log a check-in as missed or partial, you can tag a reason (bad sleep, stress, whatever it was), and that's exactly what feeds the day-7 breakdown. Honestly, you not running into it is more useful feedback than if it were missing — probably means it's buried too deep in the flow right now. Going to look at surfacing it more clearly, thanks for flagging it!
The failure pattern angle is genuinely interesting, but seven days feels long to wait for the payoff. What if the app surfaced a small "hint" after day two or three, like noticing you skip mornings on days you sleep in, just enough to keep you hooked while the full picture builds out.
@ule882420426780 Really good catch — the 7-day window is partly there because I wanted enough data points before calling something a "pattern" instead of noise, but you're right that it's a long stretch with zero payoff in the meantime. A lightweight early signal around day 2-3 (even just "you've skipped mornings twice after late nights") could keep the loop alive without overselling a conclusion this early. Going to think about how to do that without it feeling like a false pattern. This is exactly the kind of feedback I was hoping to get here, thanks!
After a week of daily check-ins I got a breakdown showing I skip workouts every Wednesday morning, which was honestly a little too accurate. The mystery angle keeps me curious enough to actually open it.
@ekelikilkn72240 Ha, sorry (not sorry) for calling out your Wednesday mornings 😄 That's honestly the reaction I was hoping the reports would get — a little uncomfortable but hard to argue with, since it's your own check-ins telling on you, not some generic tip. Really glad the mystery framing is what's actually pulling you back in day to day, that was the part I was most unsure would land. Thanks for trying it out!
The failure pattern reveal after 7 days sounds genuinely clever, would love to see you add a weekly recap card that compares my streaks across different habits so I can spot which ones I keep abandoning on the same day of the week.
@kadriyeirvowna That's a really clean feature idea, thank you. Right now the pattern report is scoped to one case (habit) at a time, but a cross-habit weekly view is a natural next layer — especially since day-of-week is already something I'm tracking per habit. Comparing streaks side by side to spot the shared drop-off day is a much better lens than what I have now. Adding this to the list, appreciate the specific suggestion!
the framing of failure as a pattern to decode instead of something to beat yourself up over is such a smart reframe, and surfacing it after exactly a week feels like the right dose of delay before the insight actually lands.
@zeliha229593239 Really glad that landed — the reframing is honestly the whole point for me, the pattern format matters way more than the tracking itself. Someone else in the comments felt 7 days was too long to wait, so it's interesting to hear the exact same delay felt earned to you. Might mean the sweet spot differs more by person than I assumed. Thanks for putting into words exactly what I was going for!
The seven-day mystery mechanic is such a clever hook, turning habit tracking into something you actually want to come back to. Whoever decided to frame missed check-ins as clues instead of guilt trips clearly gets how people actually behave.
@esranldf That was me, for better or worse — I built this because most trackers just guilt-trip you with a streak going to zero, and that never actually changed my behavior, it just made me stop opening the app. Framing a miss as a clue instead of a failure was the one design choice I was most stubborn about keeping, so it means a lot that it reads that way from the outside. Thanks for putting it so well!