How we use dopamine to get you to spend less time on your phone

Hi HN,

Ethan and I were in the January batch of this year (YC W26) and after a lot of pivots in the B2B SaaS space we felt pretty burnt out. We were both pretty good software engineers (if I may say so myself) but with Claude/Codex being so good at coding, the joy of programming was gone. Being able to see our ideas come to life instantly was awesome but the act of writing code - poof! At most of the companies I worked at, I didn't really care about the products themselves but I got a lot of joy out the work anyway because the act of breaking down problems and architecting solutions was so fun. With that aspect taken out, I began to seek joy in the products themselves and unfortunately that was not to be found in B2B SaaS.

Eventually we decided to just quit the space, re-focus on what mattered to us and pivot to consumer. I had written a sudoku app back in University which was fairly successful and I felt that consumer was a place we could stand out. We cared a lot about design, had a creative streak and found the problem space a hell of a lot more interesting. Over the last four months we have been building Island. Island is a different kind of screen time app but I'll let the blog post do the explaining.

We have a waitlist while we work out the kinks but I'll be letting in a big batch today so you won't have to wait long if you decide to try it! Whatever your thoughts on waitlists may be, ours has been a lifesaver. With every bit of marketing we get an influx of installs and the waitlist allows us to smooth out the number of new people trying the app on any given day. And with each batch we're able to sharpen the experience for the next batch. So far we've got a ton of great feedback and our users seem to find the app pretty sticky! We hope you enjoy using it too, we'd love to hear your thoughts.

- Ashish