It Started as a Joke
March 2026. The company I work for had one of those international weeks where everyone working remotely comes into the office at once. Good energy, a lot of conversations that wouldn't normally happen over a video call. At some point our German freelancer mentioned haptic feedback almost in passing — not a deep dive, just a mention. The idea apparently had legs, because someone who is technically a freelancer but in practice one of my closest collaborator and mentor — a core developer of the community forum framework Flarum — ended up building it into their upcoming major release.
I filed it away somewhere in the back of my head and didn't think much more about it.
A day or two later I was at dinner with a coworker. We got talking about my situation — I'd been thinking about doing further education but couldn't figure out how to make it work financially. Going full-time as a student wasn't realistic. I needed income. I said I felt kind of stuck. They, probably more as a joke than anything else, said: why don't you just build an app on the side?
I said yeah, sure, I'd do it that weekend.
The weekend came and went. I did not build an app.
The Second Push
What did happen was that the idea refused to fully leave. I kept turning it over — what would I even build? — without landing on anything concrete. After a few days it faded and I went back to my regular 9-to-5.
Then in mid-March, a former coworker sent me a link to a university program specifically designed around part-time work. I got excited and immediately showed my coworker. We sat down together and ran the numbers.
The numbers didn't work. Not if I stayed full-time. To do the education I wanted, something had to give on the income side.
My coworker said it again: now really — just build an app.
This time it landed differently. My "yeah I'll do it" had weight behind it that it hadn't had before. A few days later, in late March, I stopped thinking about it and started actually doing it.
The $100 Commitment
The first thing I did was set everything up properly — on my own, separate from my employer. New email addresses, a new GitHub organisation, an Apple Developer account. That last one costs $100 a year.
That hundred dollars mattered more than it probably should have. The moment I paid it, something shifted. I was now $100 down on this idea. I had to follow through. It sounds ridiculous in retrospect but the financial commitment made it real in a way that a good intention never could have.
I should mention: I had essentially no iOS development experience. I'd opened Xcode once, maybe played with the simulator for an hour total. I had eight-plus years of professional software development behind me, but none of it was Swift, none of it was SwiftUI, none of it was Apple's ecosystem. I knew what I was doing in general. I had no idea what I was doing specifically.
I also knew, from watching a beta testing process at a company I'd worked with, that the App Store review process had a reputation for being unforgiving. That didn't discourage me. It probably should have, at least a little.
The Idea Itself
I'd always known I wanted to build something that used the iPhone's hardware in a way that felt native and interesting — not just a website in an app wrapper. The haptics conversation from the company week was still rattling around in my head. I pulled on that thread, and eventually landed on a concept: one invisible goal, a handful of invisible mines, nothing on screen, navigate entirely by vibration. That became Pulsefield. If you want the full design story — why the maze didn't work, how the haptic signals are differentiated — it's on the Pulsefield blog.
No Ads. Non-Negotiable.
One design decision was made before I wrote a single line of code: no ads. Ever.
I genuinely hate ads in apps. The "pay to remove them" model bothers me almost as much as the ads themselves — it poisons the experience from the start. I wanted to build something I'd actually want to use, something that felt like Apple might have made it. Ads were incompatible with that from day one.
The answer to "but how do you make money?" is optional in-app purchases — people who want to support the game can, everyone else gets the full experience regardless. Whether that model actually works, I don't know yet. But it felt like the only honest way to do it.
What I Still Don't Know
I want to be direct about something: I have real doubts about whether Pulsefield will find an audience. Not a performed humility, actual uncertainty. Will anyone stumble across it in the App Store and genuinely enjoy it? I don't know. "Haptic minefield navigation" is not a concept that writes its own marketing.
What I do know is that I built something I care about, on a platform I had to learn from scratch, while working a full-time job, and I shipped it. Whether that turns into side income or just an expensive and time-consuming hobby remains to be seen.
The dinner table joke turned into something real. That's more than I expected when I said yes. Pulsefield is on the App Store — and if you want to know what actually happened when I tried to submit it, the tax forms, the EU compliance, the rejection I brought entirely on myself — that's the next post.