When the thing you need doesn't exist.

I bought a Wear OS watch because I wanted a smartwatch.

There was just one small problem: I couldn't get my private calendars onto it.

My calendars live in Nextcloud. I wanted to look at my wrist and see what's coming up. Something that seemed pretty basic for a smartwatch.

So I started looking.

As far as I could tell, Wear OS didn't really offer what I needed out of the box. There were apps that covered parts of it, but either they didn't do what I needed or required signing up for a trial subscription just to get access to the basic functionality.

That annoyed me.

I had bought a new smartwatch, and somehow it felt surprisingly unsmart.

So I did what you sometimes do when you can't find the thing you need:

I built it myself.

At first, WatchMyCalendar was simply an app for me. I wasn't trying to build a business or launch a product. I just wanted my calendar on my watch.

Then something unexpected happened.

I posted about it on Reddit, in a fairly small community. There were around 22,000 registered users — and the post generated about 5,000 page views in a short time. I also came across people in other forums looking for something very similar.

Maybe this wasn't just my problem.

That changed the direction of the project.

I still didn't want to turn a basic calendar function into something you had to subscribe to. So I kept a free version. The paid features came later, mostly from a simple question:

What else would I want this app to do?

Some of those ideas became useful enough to build. I grouped them into different tiers and eventually made them available as one-time purchases.

Not because the original problem suddenly became a business opportunity.

But because building and maintaining software takes time, and if something is useful to other people too, it seems fair that there is a way for that time to pay for itself.

That's probably the pattern behind a lot of things at nuumoo:

Start with a small piece of friction.

Fix it because it bothers you.

And then see whether the solution might make someone else's life a little easier too.