Odin

About

Odin is a planner that connects long-term goals to daily action.

Outcome

I designed and built the product entirely solo, covering product strategy, research, UI/UX, frontend development, onboarding, and post-launch iteration, despite starting with no development experience. I shipped the product to production, grew it to 50+ active users, and generated revenue from paying customers.

Problem

My goals were scattered across Notion, Figma, Apple Notes, and paper.

The real problem was not organization. It was visibility.

When goals were no longer constantly in front of me, I defaulted to planning instead of action. I would lose sight of what I wanted to achieve months or years ahead and spend entire days on work disconnected from it.

Most productivity tools helped organize tasks. Very few helped maintain momentum toward a long-term direction.

Research & Insight

Research revealed a surprising pattern: people still relied heavily on paper planners.

Digital tools often felt rigid, overloaded, or disconnected from how people naturally think and plan.

Out of 64 survey responses:

• ~69% mentioned using pen and paper regularly
• ~61% struggled to break large goals into actionable steps
• ~50% wanted to visualize the entire year in one place

That insight completely changed the direction of the product.

I stopped thinking about how to build a better digital planner and started thinking about why paper still worked better for so many people.

Building the product

I reduced the entire system to one primitive: the column.

Paper planners already work this way. A column for the day. A column for the week. A column for the month. The structure stays familiar while the timeframe changes.

Paper feels intuitive because the mental model never changes. People simply zoom in or out.

I built Odin around the same principle. The same column system powers every timeframe: daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly. Users learn the system once, then navigate every planning horizon without learning new patterns.

I enforced one constraint throughout the project: start from one concept, and refuse to introduce another until the first one genuinely fails.

That constraint prevented the product from collapsing into the same complexity as the tools I wanted to replace.

Once I defined the system, I focused on momentum and usability.

I refined interaction details that reinforced progress without interrupting flow:

• lightweight navigation between timeframes
• fast interactions with minimal friction
• celebratory feedback on goal completion
• visual continuity across every planning horizon

I did not optimize for feature density. I optimized for daily use without cognitive fatigue.

Role

I handled the entire product lifecycle:

• Problem identification
• User research
• Product strategy
• UI/UX design
• Frontend development
• Onboarding early users
• Collecting feedback and iterating post-launch

This project marked my first time building and shipping a production application from scratch, so I learned development while actively designing and shipping the product.

Learnings