Grow is an app that uses psychometry to help you build your individual habits. By answering questions about your mental state after the habit, the psychological strength of your habits are assessed. It is a complete indie project. I taught myself coding and bootstrapped to make it happen. It is based on an approach I developed during my PhD research in motivational psychology: Psychometric Habit Building. That basically means that you measure psychological aspects of the habit you want to build (automaticity, self-efficacy, motivational interference…). Data is collected by answering questions in-app about ones experience after having finished the habit. You then get feedback on different aspects of your habit and can see how it grows and detect specific weaknesses, if you have any, and adapt accordingly. It is quite a special app because, as it is developed by a psychologist and is based on my dissertation research on habit building. I conducted a study with 100 German university students that built new study habits with my app. I measured many variables like automaticity of behavior, distractibility, awareness etc. It worked so well that I basically spend 2018 making a polished version for the AppStore (the study was conducted using TestFlight). The paper on this study is going to get peer reviewed and published soon. I constantly analyze the data and tweak the app to make habit building even more efficient. It really is a fun journey and I have a blast every time my users tell me their Grow stories about successful habit building. That is what keeps me going.
