By skyforbes 
In early of 2019, I became obsessed with something we all do 20,000 times a day — breathing.
After reading James Nestor’s best-selling book, Breath, and learning how “breathwork”, the act of consciously altering one’s breath, can help reduce anxiety, improve sleep quality, and improve heart health, I set out to create the “Headspace” of breathwork apps.
Frustrated by the lack of breathing apps at the time, I decided to build one myself — despite the fact that I had zero mobile app development experience.
Four short years and 100K+ downloads, 1,000+ subscribers, and 4.8 stars later, I’d say that while my app, One Deep Breath, didn’t achieve the “mainstream” success I originally hoped for (21-year-old me thought I’d have a Ferrari by now, not a 2008 Honda Fit), it is in the rare class of indie apps that was cash flow positive, objectively well-reviewed, and successfully acquired.
I’ve had several people ask me the “story” behind One Deep Breath, and to be honest I’ve put this off for a while because I feel like a bit of an imposter.
This is not some story of a multi-million-dollar exit.
So why write this?
I’m writing this with one person in mind — my former self, and people like me, who are interested in building cash-flow-centered software businesses but haven’t done it before.
The four years I spent working on One Deep Breath were the most informative, influential, and educational years of my life. Initially being the sole person working on it, I learned not just how to engineer a scalable, high-quality app, but the challenges that come with growing a business in general.
In writing this I’m hoping I can help some aspiring entrepreneur out there avoid some of that pain (while also selfishly marketing myself as a developer, of course, 😉).
Like most things in life, the reality of building a business is, 99% of the time, quite boring — so I will structure this article as a postmortem of sorts, guiding you through the biggest lessons I learned in roughly sequential order while sprinkling in anecdotes and stories.
This article will be focused on the “business” side of things, beginning with the lessons I learned near the inception of One Deep Breath and working towards lessons about marketing, scaling, and leadership.
If you are interested in the software engineering/technical lessons learned, check out Part 2.
So let’s go back to May of 2019, when I had the “aha” moment for One Deep Breath…
Insight #1: Don’t solve a problem. Solve YOUR problem.
All businesses solve a problem — when I was in college, I heard time and time again from my professors that you needed to truly, deeply understand the problem you’re trying to solve before building a solution.
While I agree with this statement, I believe the ways in which many people go about “understanding” problems are inherently flawed: interviewing prospective customers, conducting market research, and looking “outside” for what issues other people are dealing with.
For whatever it’s worth, I think this is a perfectly valid method to come up with a bunch of problems that need solving.
The “problem” (pun intended) with this method is that if you don’t truly, deeply connect to the issue that you are building a solution for, you are adding an insane amount of cognitive overload to the process of building your solution.
If you experience the problem that you are trying to solve (in my case, a lack of guided breathwork apps with the exercises I needed), then you don’t need to rely on focus groups, user feedback, and customer interviews at the very early stages of the business.
Why?
Because you are the customer.
Imagine how much faster you can move; and how much more agile you can become if you are building a solution for yourself. Solving your own problem allows you to move at a velocity that simply isn’t possible if you don’t deeply feel the problem you’re building a solution for.
“When you solve your own problem, you create a tool that you’re passionate about. And passion is key. Passion means you’ll truly use it and care about it. And that’s the best way to get others to feel passionate about it too.” — Getting Real
Sure, eventually you will probably build things into your app that don’t interest you, but at the very beginning stages, while building a minimally viable product (MVP), you and you alone should be the target customer.
Simply put: if you don’t have a problem, don’t start a business.
Insight #2: Re-Invent the Wheel: Don’t Fear Competition
There are now dozens of solid breathwork apps on the market. While this wasn’t the case when I started working on One Deep Breath, there were still a handful of basic breathwork apps out there with a few million downloads.
A lot of people would fear this — in fact, I had advisors and mentors bring it up on multiple occasions as a reason that One Deep Breath would never work.
While I do believe going into an incredibly saturated market, like meditation or workout apps (or even breathwork in 2025) is a generally poor idea unless your product is incredibly differentiated, the notion that you shouldn’t pursue an idea just because a handful of other successful apps exist in your space is inherently wrong.
If you’re trying to invent the next trillion-dollar idea, this may be more true, but I’d venture to guess that there are dozens of meditation apps that bring in over a $1 million in revenue per year — a number that for most aspiring entrepreneurs would be a dream come true.
There is no “single” winner in almost any domain — there are a few big winners, more medium winners, and lots of small winners in the digital marketplace — with many of those “small” winners raking in more money than you could ever dream of.
The bottom line: Be different, be better, but don’t be afraid of a little competition — you don’t need to be #1 to win big.
Insight #3: Build it Yourself
So, you’ve identified a problem that you think can be solved with software.
Now it’s time to raise funds, find that technical co-founder, and hire a development team, right?
Not quite.
You can probably learn to code and build it yourself — without money, without a team, and in some cases, without a co-founder.
You might be thinking to yourself, “That’s easy for you to say, you’re a programmer!”
While I’d now consider myself a “seasoned” engineer, at the time I started working on One Deep Breath I was anything but.
I don’t have a Computer Science Degree (Philosophy majors represent). I had zero “professional” coding experience. I am horrible at LeetCode and quite frankly had never built anything “substantial” before (after several small projects with little success).
I thought I was “technical”, but not “technical” enough to build an entire app.
And guess what?
That’s 100% true — when you first start, you will not be technical enough to build an entire app — but that’s why you start, because as you go, you’ll gain the skills and knowledge necessary to do the next step, then the next step, and the next.
Pretty soon you’ll have not only an MVP but a highly employable skillset and portfolio piece to match.
“Start by doing what’s necessary, then do what’s possible and suddenly you are doing the impossible.” — St. Francis of Assisi
The day I stopped competing in university pitch competitions and “connecting” with potential co-founders on LinkedIn and just started writing the code that would eventually be One Deep Breath was the day my business truly began.
Think I’m an anomaly? One of my co-workers, who taught himself Flutter using a combination of Chat GPT and occasional mentoring sessions with yours truly is about to release a very well-done, polished binaural beats app after less than a year of coding. He was a musician for 10+ years and had never touched code before this.
Not to say he isn’t a smart guy, but if a Philosophy major and a musician can do it, you can too.
The bottom line: If you’re not motivated enough to build it yourself, you probably shouldn’t build it in the first place.
Insight #4: Your app will never be done. Launch it.
By far the biggest obstacle throughout the process of building One Deep Breath is the mental barrier of feeling like the app is “done” and ready to launch.
I’m a huge perfectionist (yes, I used to be the annoying guy in job interviews who said his greatest weakness is that he’s a perfectionist), which is useful at times during the development process, but in general seems to prevent me from feeling like the app is ever “good enough”, which is a huge negative.
Despite the app being very well-tested and ready to go, I had huge reservations about launching the app, simply because I knew there were more features and content I could add, and that maybe they would make a bigger splash at launch if I included them.
In the end, I regret the self-imposed launch delays to add more features for a simple reason: — there will always be more features/content/bug fixes that you can add, and you can “launch” several times.
It seems so easy to romanticize the importance of a launch as being this huge moment where you go viral and get hundreds of thousands of downloads, but the reality for most apps is that it’s better to launch early and get the idea out into the wild as opposed to constantly keeping the idea under wraps until it’s perfect.
Launching the app allowed us to begin generating revenue, attract new potential partners, and adopt an enthusiastic community of early adopters.
If I let my fear of being “done” get in the way of launching, I’d still be working on the pre-release build of One Deep Breath!
Bonus Insight: When is it Good Enough?
I get it though — people want a sensible answer to “when” to launch — surely you can launch too early, right?
Well guess what — if you’re following my advice above and building a product that solves your problem, then the solution is right in front of you — do you use your own app?
I used One Deep Breath every day, even in its infancy, because it was good enough to use every day.
Was it perfect? No.
Did it look like it was designed by a color-blind toddler? Yes.
Did I want to add tons of stuff? Yes.
Where there bugs? Yes.
But was it good enough for me to use every day? Absolutely — and if it’s good enough for you to use every day, it’s going to be good enough for people who have the same issue.
Note: Another benefit of launching early is that you return to “reality”. When you work on a project for long enough, there’s a phenomenon that happens where you actually lose all touch with objective reality with how useful or good your product is. Launching early, along with my next point about monetizing early, keeps this dangerous period to a minimum.
The Bottom Line: Just launch. Then launch again. And again. And again.
Insight #5: Until People Pay You Money, You Have Nothing
As I mentioned, One Deep Breath was not my first rodeo in the world of entrepreneurship.
I have started a finance website, web scraping consultancy, health/wellness blog/e-commerce website, and a few other pet projects over the years.
One thing I learned through all these endeavors, is that you can do all the customer interviews you want, you can watch your usage metrics go through the roof, and you can see the positive reviews trickle in, but none of it really matters unless someone somewhere is willing to actually pay you money.
Users spending time on your app is nice. Leaving a 5-star review is nice. A survey asking users “How much would you pay for my service” is nice.
But getting someone to take out their credit card, agree to subscribe to an app that they might forget to cancel, and then actually watching them convert after that trial is a completely different thing.
You just do not know if people will buy your service until you actually ask them to take out their wallets and pay.
My first company, BluVisor, had a few hundred active users, many of them professional investors who I would talk to on a regular basis and who seemed to love the product.
But guess what? When it came time to actually subscribe?
Nada. BluVisor shut down with literally zero subscribers.
I decided not to make this mistake with One Deep Breath — I decided to monetize before I even fully launched the app.
Want to know how?
I sent out an email as soon as I had a few hundred beta users asking them to donate however much they wanted in exchange for lifetime access to One Deep Breath.
I didn’t even have payments set up in the app yet, and it wasn’t close to being released on iOS — I literally put a link to donate on Venmo and PayPal and told people to email when it was done.
And guess what?
People actually did.
Not a ton of people, something like a dozen or so, but I gained valuable information from this:
- People saw this half-baked service with tons of bugs and flaws something worth getting in on early.
- I had an idea of what I could actually charge for One Deep Breath (more on that later). I had a suggested donation amount but had other people give more, like a lot more.
- I had an idea of what my conversion rate might look like — 12 or so donations on 300 emails aren’t amazing (4%), but if an app gets 1,250 downloads a month, converts at 4%, and charges $20/subscription, you have yourself a nice little $1,000/month side hustle. That was enough for me to keep investing in One Deep Breath.
The key thing here is that money is a real exchange of value, not some fake proxy for one.
Insight #6: Don’t Pivot, Prune
You’ve launched your app — it’s out there. People are downloading it, but it’s not exactly going as planned — what now?
A common startup mantra is to “fail fast and pivot”.
I agree with the general sentiment of this statement, but in my previous experience, it has led to a vicious cycle of pivot after pivot, iteration after iteration.
In my previous ventures, I would take the first sign of failure, whether it be low conversion rates, dwindling daily engagement, or a declining user base as a need for a massive overhaul.
It would be back to the drawing board and customer interviews, where I’d almost entirely scrap the original product and start anew. It felt like I was releasing each version with the intention of failing so that I could move on to the next pivot as quickly as possible.
With One Deep Breath, I took a different approach.
Build a real product (even if it’s small and incomplete), release it into the wild (without directly asking for feedback), and then look at the metrics.
Determine what works, throw out what doesn’t, and improve upon what does.
Contrary to my former “pivot-first” mentality, very rarely have I released an update to One Deep Breath only to find that everything needs to be thrown out — there’s almost always a hidden gem that shines above the rest in terms of engagement or revenue production.
As a side note, One Deep Breath is actually the direct result of this process — it began as an all-in-one meditation/breathwork/mindfulness productivity tool, only to find that the meditation and productivity aspects weren’t all that valuable (or unique) to people — on the other hand, people were using (and coming back to) the original web app just for breathwork exercises — rather than scrapping the idea entirely, I decided to prune it down to what worked: simple, science-based breathing exercises.
Insight #7: You Don’t Need a Co-Founder, Funding, Social, etc.
Early on, I felt like I needed a co-founder — someone who could help me steer One Deep Breath in the right direction.
Why?
Because that’s what you do in startups, right? Steve Jobs needs his Woz. Zuck needs his Eduardo (that sure worked out great for both parties). It’s always a dynamic duo, right?
Later on, I’d find a co-founder. Originally, things seemed like they were a great fit, but within months I felt like I’d made a huge mistake.
This isn’t on him — I was a very inexperienced leader at the time and was simply doing what I “thought” I should do based on common startup wisdom.
Y-Combinator heavily favors teams with co-founders, so there must be a reason, right?
Sure, there are obviously advantages of having a co-founder or doing all sorts of the idiomatic “startup-y” things that startups do, like raise tons of funding, go to networking events, and compete in pitch competitions.
But you’re not a statistical norm — you’re not a company at Y-Combinator. You’re you. You’re building a product that you hope can be successful, and every second you spend doing things you should do rather than actually building your business (read: make money) is a waste of time.
If you’re trying to force it, you’re doing it for the wrong reasons.
You shouldn’t “search” for your co-founder — you should find each other through the result of your work.
You shouldn’t “try” to raise funds — it should grow organically from the success that you have launching your MVP.
Put your head down, work on the product, and worry about what you can control. The rest will, or won’t come later, but trying to force it because it seems like the “right” thing to do will only make things worse.
Ironically enough, following my own advice, I’d eventually work with an incredibly talented musician-turned-Flutter Developer who would have been the perfect candidate to be a co-founder, had I not been looking so hard in all the wrong places.
Insight #8: Stop Listening to (Most) Advice
This is going to sound perhaps a little arrogant, but one of the biggest mistakes I made with One Deep Breath was listening to so much advice.
Starting One Deep Breath while I was in college, I had basically unlimited access to mentorship and educational opportunities.
While I would love to speak fondly about these experiences, I can truthfully say that the majority of advice I received was objectively wrong.
Here are a few that stick out in my mind:
- “You need to pivot to B2B sales if you want this to work. No one will buy this as a consumer-facing product.”
- “Your biggest competitor has a million followers on TikTok — you can’t compete, you need to pivot to a different niche — maybe grounding?”
- “I love the app, but I just hate breathwork. Can you do meditation instead? Why not just make it a meditation app?”
Bear in mind that each of these pieces of advice came from incredibly successful, smart, kind people who are genuinely trying to help.
The problem is that unless that individual understands the problem that you are trying to solve, at the level of depth that you are trying to solve it, their advice is likely counterproductive.
You are (hopefully) starting this business because you are the expert — trust yourself, and use advice in the areas that you are weaker in.
For example — I relied heavily on mentors for advice on financials, leadership, and marketing — but I would never let someone who knows nothing about the space that I’m in (tell me) why my solution won’t work.
Insight #9: Cut Your Loses: Stop Spending Time on Things That Don’t Make You Money
This might sound like incredibly mundane advice, to “focus on things that make you money”, but when you’re in the midst of dealing with a million different things, having your focus drift to “non-money making activities” is eerily simple.
A few thoughts on this…
Example #1
An already paying customer has an incredibly niche feature request — something that will take you several hours to complete and you are certain will generate no additional revenue (it’s not a feature that would drive people to subscribe).
Meanwhile, your paywall, which is seen by thousands of people per month and is the thing standing in between you and your customer’s wallets, has dozens of optimizations that can be made.
What did I find myself working on?
The small feature for the existing user.
Why?
Because saying no sucks!
You want to make customers happy. That is a good thing! However, focusing only on making existing customers happy will only result in your business stalling, leading to you losing momentum as an entrepreneur and ultimately failing all your customers.
This may sound depressing, but in a world where only ~35% of subscribers re-subscribe — spending the majority of your time worrying about existing subscribers simply doesn’t make sense from a business perspective.
If you want to survive, you need to find a balance (one that skews heavily in favor of generating new business) and this means you will have to say no to your customers.
Example #2
You have an angry customer — they subscribed, forgot to cancel, and by God, they were charged for the service that they purchased (after receiving reminders of their upcoming subscription)!
They are mad. Livid. They email you with obscenities and threats of the dreaded 1-Star Review.
What will you ever do!?!?
You give the person a refund, apologize, and give them free access to your service for X months as a gesture of goodwill, and instead spend your time and energy on customers who will pay you.
It’s truly that simple.
The Philosophy major in me finds this ethically wrong — you’re basically “rewarding” bad behavior. But from a business perspective, I’ve only ever benefitted from this approach — I’ve had people who left one-star reviews turn into shining advocates for the company.
These types of people aren’t going to pay you anyway — so why not try to turn them into a brand advocate?
The same goes for things like subscriber fraud, account sharing, etc. — sure, I could take hours to engineer solutions so that people can’t do this, but for what reason?
In my experience, bad actors account for less than 1% of all users. So why spend your time focusing on the 1% of people who will do anything to not pay you instead of the 99% who might?
Insight #10: Balance is Everything. Think about the other needs in life.
Many people, myself included, start a business thinking that success will be rapid, immediate, and meteoric.
While this is true for a small fraction of companies, the reality is that success will almost certainly take several years, and be an incredibly draining, challenging process in more ways than one — financially, emotionally, and cognitively.
This might be the hardest lesson to learn without actually going through it, but I feel like it’s truly the reason why One Deep Breath was a “moderate” success instead of a “smashing” one — I simply ran out of steam.
In retrospect, the person I was while running One Deep Breath wasn’t in a place to really make the business succeed — I didn’t have the skills nor experience — but I think that I could have greatly improved my chances by being more balanced about my approach.
Balance is such a vague, woo-woo term, but I think there are some practical aspects to it as well…
Keep some source of income
I quit my day job as soon as I had some savings and we were generating revenue — I was fine with this for a few years, but eventually, this strain would cause an insurmountable amount of pressure and stress.
You might be fine with making next to nothing now, but how about 3 years from now?
Trust me — at most 40-hour-per-week jobs, you have enough time to make a side hustle work (I built most of One Deep Breath while working full-time).
Stay Healthy: Physically, Emotionally, Socially
This sounds like such stupid, mundane advice, to “stay healthy” — but if you are obsessed with something as much as I was obsessed with the potential that One Deep Breath had, keeping this in perspective is incredibly hard.
While I stayed physically fit (probably because I was running a health/wellness company), I prioritized my business over everything else — my emotional health, my relationships, and my hobbies all suffered greatly due to my obsession with One Deep Breath.
Don’t buy into the alpha male, lone wolf mentality of doing it alone.
Keep up with your friends. Keep going to the gym. Keep playing guitar or writing fiction or reading or whatever it is you do to feel joy in life.
Paradoxically, all these things will help you stay on the “grind”, even if they seem like they’re taking valuable time out of your work.
Schedule Time to Step Away
I recently saw a LinkedIn post where a startup founder says that he has a simple test for potential candidates:
He messages them on the weekend, and if they respond before Monday he considers them a “fit”, while he considers everyone else “not committed enough”.
I cannot think of something more laughably stupid.
Running a business, you are going to constantly have something to work on.
There will never not be a feature you can build, a bug you can fix, or a support ticket you can respond to.
If you stay constantly locked in, you will truly never come up with anything innovative or creative.
Think about all your best ideas — did they come under times of immense pressure and stress, or did they happen when you least expected it?
This isn’t an excuse not to work hard — I think most people can (and entrepreneurs probably need to) work 60 hours a week and still carve out time to actively not do anything.
Stop spending time on TikTok and Instagram Reels and go outside, play an instrument, or hang out with your friends. I guarantee you that the time you actually spend working on your business will increase in productivity so dramatically that the time you “lose” not working on it will be minuscule in comparison.
Conclusion: Inspiration is Finite — Start Now
As I write this, I ask:
“If the 21-year-old me who started working on One Deep Breath read this, would I actually learn and apply anything?”
If I’m being perfectly honest with myself, I think that the answer is probably no — in fact I’d venture to guess that the arrogant, driven 21-year-old me probably heard a lot of this advice and chose not to apply it (sorry, Dad!)
Most of the knowledge that comes from starting a business comes from one place, and one place alone — experience.
This might be a depressing metaphor, but I partially look at starting a business as an exercise in enduring pain — like running a marathon.
Everyone has to run the 26.2 miles. You can do all the research you want, train for months, and get all the perfect gear, but until you take the first step, you are no further along than everyone else still standing at the starting line.
So why not start now?
Interested in the engineering lessons I learned while building One Deep Breath? Check out Part 2 here!
Want to stay in touch? Let’s connect on LinkedIn or email me at [email protected]