I want to tell you about something my team and I built, and more honestly, about everything we got wrong while building it.
If you have ever thought about making an app, or any product really, this might save you a few months of headaches. We made most of the common mistakes so you do not have to.
The short version: we built a mobile app called REPS Time for under $300, launched it in the spring of 2025, and learned more in the first year than any course could have taught us. Here is the whole story, including the parts that stung.
The problem that would not go away
Hour tracking kept coming up on our real estate coaching calls. Constantly.
Everyone knew they needed to document their hours for Real Estate Professional Status, or REPS, which is one of the biggest tax benefits an active investor can claim. But almost no one was actually doing it. People would start strong in January, then life would happen. Notes got scattered across phones and notebooks. By March the tracking had fallen apart.
Honestly, it was a pain point for us too. I was doing the work and hitting my hours, but logging them felt like an annoying admin task that kept slipping.
Then some friends got audited. They had legitimately qualified. They did the work. But they lost the REPS deduction because they did not have a clean log to show. For a high earner, REPS can shield $30,000 or more in taxes in a single year. They lost that, not because they did not earn it, but because they could not prove it.
Real people. Real portfolios. Real money gone.
I am not a developer, so the idea just sat there for years. Then two people on my team, Meri and Stefan, said they could take it on. Meri is a trained developer who had never built a mobile app before. She was smart, thoughtful, and actually cared about the problem. When I mentioned the idea again, she said she could build it. So we did.
How we built REPS Time
Here is what it actually took.
We built the app in a no-code tool called FlutterFlow. We modeled the core experience after MileIQ, the mileage app, where you swipe left or right on activities to log them. In our version you swipe through calendar events and sort your real estate hours in a few seconds a day.
We used AI for almost everything else. The logo. The marketing copy. The screenshots. The little bits that used to require a designer and a copywriter.
We hired one freelance developer on Upwork for a single custom piece, the calendar integration, because that part was beyond what the no-code tool could do cleanly.
Total cost: under $300.
The reality was less tidy than that number sounds. Apple rejected us three times before approving the app. We launched on April 18, 2025. It then took about two months to get our first paying customer. The first stretch was quiet enough to make you question the whole thing.
For a first attempt at something we needed anyway, I am calling it a win. But the value was never really the app. It was the six lessons below.
Six lessons we learned the hard way
1. Building is easy. Design is brutal.
I assumed the coding would be the hard part. It was not. The real challenge was creating a design where every tap feels good and people actually want to open the app.
Getting software to work is one thing. Getting a person to enjoy using it, day after day, is a completely different skill. If you are planning a product, respect the design work. It is where most of the effort goes and most of the difference lives.
2. Turn on analytics from day one.
This one is on me. We added tracking later than we should have, and when we finally looked at the data, we found that only 7 percent of users were syncing their calendar. Calendar syncing was the core feature we built the whole app around.
Seven percent. We had built a highway and almost no one was driving on it.
So we are now redesigning REPS Time to work great for people who do not sync a calendar at all. That is a good change, but we would have known to make it in week one if analytics had been on from the start. Track your product from the first day, even if the numbers are tiny.
3. Zero churn is a wild feeling.
Once someone starts tracking their hours in REPS Time, they stay. Our churn is basically zero.
The reason makes sense in hindsight. After you have logged weeks of hours, switching to another tool means abandoning your record and starting over. Nobody wants to do that mid-year. We did not plan this, but it turns out to be one of the strongest things about the product. If you can build something where leaving means losing your own work, retention takes care of itself.
4. App Store Optimization matters more than you think.
Most of our downloads come straight from the App Store, from people searching for a solution to the exact problem the app solves. That means the words and images on our App Store page do a lot of the selling.
Small monthly tweaks to the description and the screenshots moved our traffic and revenue in a measurable way. Tiny changes, real results. If you launch an app and ignore your store page, you are leaving most of your growth on the table. Treat it like a landing page you improve every month.
5. Pick your tech stack carefully.
FlutterFlow got us launched fast, and I am grateful for that. But now it is holding us back from the bigger changes we want to make. The tool that helped us start has become the thing slowing us down.
If we started today, we would build in React Native instead. And here is the part that still surprises me: with today's AI tools, you can build and launch a simple app in about a week. The barrier to starting has never been lower. Just choose the foundation with the next two years in mind, not only the first month.
6. Do one thing really, really well.
REPS Time does one thing. It tracks real estate hours. That is it.
We have tried launching bigger, more complex projects in the past, and they never made it out the door. The single-purpose app shipped because it was small enough to finish. Every product we build from here on will do one job and do it well. This ties directly into the same software-as-an-asset framework we use to decide what to build in the first place: pick one real problem, solve it completely, move on.
The part nobody talks about
At one point we got a one-star review that was pretty clearly from a competitor. It stung for about five minutes. Then we remembered it is just part of the process.
If you build something and put it in front of the public, you should expect this. A bad-faith review, a rude email, a snarky comment. None of it is a reason to stop. It usually means you built something worth reacting to. Read it, learn anything real that is buried inside it, and keep going.
The before and after
Here is the change we were really after, in plain terms.
Before, a serious investor would do all the work to qualify for REPS, then track it in a spreadsheet they forgot about by spring. At audit, that gap could cost them a deduction worth tens of thousands of dollars. All the effort, none of the proof.
After, that same investor spends about ten seconds a day swiping through their calendar, and walks into tax season with a clean, dated log that holds up. The work was already being done. Now it is finally being counted.
That gap, between doing the work and being able to prove it, is the whole reason the app exists.
What is next
We are redesigning REPS Time to also help the short-term rental crowd track their material participation hours for the 100-hour requirement, and to make the whole experience smoother based on everything the data has taught us.
We are also building a second single-purpose app, Kids Payroll, for business-owner parents who want to pay their kids the right way, capture the tax benefit, and help their kids start building wealth early. Same rule as before: one job, done well.
If there is a single takeaway from our first year of building, it is this. You do not need to be a developer, you do not need a big budget, and you do not need permission. You need a real problem you have personally lived, the patience to sit through a slow start, and the willingness to look at the honest numbers and change course. The rest is more learnable than it has ever been.
The next thing you build does not have to be a rental. It might be the tool you keep wishing existed.
