research
What 500 first app ideas taught us about personal software
We read the first prompt of 500 new Leanfinit builders. The patterns reveal a lot about what people want from software that is just for them.
Leanfinit Research
Research team
· 2 min read
The first sentence someone types into an app builder is a small confession: here is the thing I have failed to organise any other way. We read 500 of them. This is what they told us.
500
first prompts analysed
March–May 2026 cohort
71%
describe a habit or a log
11 min
median idea-to-app time
1 in 4
mention a failed spreadsheet
What people ask for first
The headline: people do not arrive wanting the next big thing. They arrive wanting one small thing to finally stick. Nearly three quarters of first prompts describe tracking something about their own life — not a business, not an audience, just a loop they want closed.
| Category | Share of first prompts | Typical examples |
|---|---|---|
| Habits & health | 38% | water, sleep, gym streaks |
| Money & budgets | 19% | shared expenses, savings goals |
| Home & family | 14% | chores, plants, meal plans |
| Hobbies & collections | 11% | books read, vinyl, recipes |
| Everything else | 18% | from beehives to bouldering grades |
The long tail is the part we love most. Beehive inspections, cold-plunge minutes, film-camera rolls in development: the whole point of personal software is that nobody would ever ship these as products — and nobody has to.
The spreadsheet refugees
One in four prompts explicitly mentions a spreadsheet, and the phrasing is rarely neutral: gave up on, keep forgetting, a mess. These builders are not discovering tracking — they are escaping a tool that punished them for trying. The pattern is common enough that we wrote about it separately in The spreadsheet trap.
Add your idea to the next 500
Whatever your version of beehive inspections is, it takes one sentence to find out what it looks like as an app.