Behind the scenes: How WizzMe has been a total failure

A year ago, I started learning SwiftUI by building a small app called “WizzMe”. It started as an over-a-weekend Hello World project that soon turned into an April Fool project due to a kinda-perfect timing. Here’s the story of this project’s failure.

We tend to read thousands of articles, podcasts, and videos about successful projects because that’s the kind of motivational content that shines the most. But reading failures and understanding the reasons behind them is also a good lesson on the long term.

Genesis

Back in 2018, I was very active in the maker community — talking with peers, discovering and reviewing their products, sharing my own.

But with time, I invested less and less time in my side projects, going from dozens a few years ago to zero nowadays. Reasons are pretty simple: I lost motivation, the maker community evolved from passionate to a toxic result-oriented growth-hacky thing, and I invested more in my day-to-day life.

That’s where the story of WizzMe begins.

Remember, it’s the time when Product Hunt was very hype. iPhone just got fully redesigned with no more home button. That kind of year in tech. Like 2024 is for AI, 2018 was for no-bezel.

At first, I wanted to make a funny April Fool shop website called “Bezel-less t-shirt” where I’d sell a unique product: a Marcel tank top. Yes. So French, right?

The very first draft of Shopless clothes — the 24-hour-long shop that would sell a unique shirt.

In the last moments before April 1st 2018, I thought it would’ve been a very bad joke that would have misled people. That’s how that first April Fool project idea was thrown away.

OK, what about that WizzMe thing?

You’re right, I rambled. Back in May 2018, I started drafting an April Fool to-do list for the upcoming years. That’s where WizzMe started to take shape.

The discussion (with myself) went like:

Remember the good ol’ time of MSN Messenger? We were having so much fun, far from the shortcomings of today’s communication. Status, messages, wizz, and winks. Either behind a screen and chatting, or offline. No overcrowded notifications, etc.

Wouldn’t it be fun to have MSN Messenger back, just for 24 hours?

Yes!

For years, the item was gathering dust, left on its own like the whole to-do list.

Not until early 2023, when I decided to give a shot to SwiftUI (Apple’s language to build apps for their platforms). I challenged myself to build a very MVP-ish version of the app with authentication, friendship, chat, wizz, and notifications. Not to mention that design and experience were not part of that MVP.

Then I felt very confused about whether it was a good idea or not, because there’s IP behind wizz and winks (you know, those short videos we were sending to each other like the dancing pig). And Microsoft is a very huge corp. Moreover, the app was a very basic chat app with close to no design.

I decided to leave the app as-is, on the side. Having proven to myself I could make a basic iOS app was enough.

Months went by. The project remained unmodified.

2024 and the revival of WizzMe (now Concizz)

Long story short about the rebranding: the app couldn’t be published on the App Store because the name was already in use, forcing me to switch to the alternative codename: Concizz.

During Q1 2024, I invested a lot of time to make Concizz usable for a long life of one day, before self-sabotaging itself the night after. I made the code more robust (even if it’s still very dirty), designed a better interface inspired by a few Figma files available out there, and implemented those winks. So you could feel the MSN Messenger nostalgia.

Early March 2024, I set up a plan to release the app with a schedule so it would be available on time on the App Store.

I would record a (very) short trailer to share on Twitter, followed by a sequence of timelapses of me coding the app at a rhythm of one-per-day until April 1st.

Apple saying “No we won’t publish your dumb app”, circa 2024

Alas, as it was hugely predictable (afterwards), Apple refused to publish the app for two reasons. First, lack of features available to customers — which I’d agree with if it was a real app. Second, the use of content I was not licensed to use, which is the sad truth.

I still kept the plan going on, sharing one video a day even after Apple refused, and switched to releasing an article detailing the story behind that failure instead of a link to the App Store.

Now what?

I’ll leave you with a little snippet I wrote on January 31st, 2024 about Concizz:

April is approaching very fast and what better timing could be than April 1st for this app?

So I’m trying to keep consistency on working on this project, Concizz, and hope I’ll be able to make it on time for the deadline.

Because I needed to turn to a new page and wanted to close this chapter correctly, the best option I found was to write about Concizz.

Now that this project is considered “done” in my mind, I can move ahead to a fresh start and write the story of yet another failed project… and start a new journey.