Our first customer

SQUEEEEE~!~!~!~!~!!!!~~~~!!1`1~!~~!!!!One~!~!~!!!

RiseOhana has its first paying customer.

Now, full transparency, it’s a friendly. Someone who knows me and decided to support what we’re building. That doesn’t make it less meaningful to me. It actually makes it more. Because they didn’t just hand over their hard earned dollar to a faceless service, they handed it over knowing exactly what they were getting into, knowing the rough edges and the work still to do, and they did it anyway.

I am incredibly grateful and incredibly humbled.

What this milestone actually means

The number is small. The check isn’t going to change anyone’s life. But emotionally? This is a giant moment. Someone valued what we built enough to part with money for it. That has to mean something. That has to be the start of something.

It also slapped me in the face with a reality I sort of knew but didn’t really FEEL until now. Creating something that deserves another person’s hard earned dollar takes an absurd amount of energy. It’s not just the code. It’s the design, the support, the messaging, the trust building, the responsiveness when something goes wrong, the iteration when something isn’t quite right. There’s a thousand small things that add up to “is this worth my money.”

We have a lot of journey left. The app needs to be friendlier, faster, more responsive, more valuable. I’m not going to pretend we’re there yet. But we’re closer than we were yesterday and we’ll be closer tomorrow.

Patience and persistence

Every single advisor I’ve talked to has said the same thing. Everything takes way longer than you think. Not by a little. By a lot. By multiples. You have to be patient. You have to be persistent. You have to keep showing up even when the bear is halfway caught up.

I’m starting to actually understand what they meant.

In other news, the app stores continue to be a saga

Quick update on the app store launch saga. Spoiler, it’s still a saga.

Google Play has rejected four more versions. Quick recap: I racked up five rejections initially, finally got approved, was live for a moment, then submitted an update and got rejected four more times in a row. So we’re at nine total rejections with a single brief approval sandwiched in the middle. Why Google?!!? Why??? Is it because I left you? I still think very highly of you! Each rejection has been the same opaque rejection email with the same generic policy citation and zero actionable feedback. Each fix I make is a guess.

Apple, on the other hand, has been an absolute pleasure. Every single submission has been approved. No rejections, no back and forth, just approvals. They keep getting faster too. One submission was approved and live the same day I sent it. I’ve been able to ship updates to my testers way faster on iOS than on Android. The Apple App Store has been consistently easier to work with than the Google Play Store, which feels weird to type out loud, but here we are.

If you’re a parent of a kid between 6 and 17 and you want to be one of our early families helping shape what RiseOhana becomes, hit me up. We’re still actively onboarding testers, especially on iOS where the update cycle is fast.

Thank you

To the friend who became our first customer. You know who you are. Thank you for believing in this enough to bet on it. We’re going to keep pushing to deserve it.

To everyone else who has watched this journey, sent encouragement, given feedback, or just liked a post here and there. Thank you. The early days of building something are lonely and your little signals matter way more than you might realize.

We have a long road still. But today feels like a milestone worth marking.

Keep on coding on, friends!

RiseOhana is my startup, a family engagement platform where parents create quests, kids share their adventures and everyone levels up together through gamified parenting and quality time rewards. Built by a nerdy dad of three who spent 28 years helping machines communicate better and decided it was time to build something that helps families do the same. If that sounds like your jam, come find us at riseohana.com.