The Purge Tracker

The Purge Tracker is one of my shipped personal apps: a room-by-room decluttering tracker. You pick a room, work through guided category prompts, and tap a decision for each item, Keep, Donate, Sell, Trash, or Relocate. A running counter shows decisions made and things leaving your house. It works, it is genuinely fun to use, and the moment of deciding while the number climbs is a real dopamine hit. So I ran the full product-strategy recipe on it to answer the harder question: if this deserves real investment, what is it actually for, and what should I build next.

What the strategy surfaced

The wedge is emotional: momentum is what pulls people in and gets them far enough to have a pile worth dealing with. But the proof of value is functional, and it lives where every decluttering method fails: the donate pile that never leaves. So the north star is not taps or even "decided to leave," it is Items Out The Door, the count of things that actually left the house. That one honest number reframed the whole roadmap. The disposal tracker, currently a side tab, is the seed of the only durable moat: a purge to disposal to sold loop that no method and no marketplace does end to end. Resale Robin, the reseller-declutterer, is the beachhead, because she is the most motivated segment and the only one with a built-in reason to spread it.

The bet, and what got cut

The Now horizon is deliberately small, cheap, and almost entirely backend-free so a solo maker can ship the whole thing: auto-create a disposal record from every leaving decision, undo, a progress bar, a resume hook, local export, and warmer microcopy at the hard moments. Accounts and sync got pushed to Next, because a local resume hook plus export covers continuity for most people without the cost and the PII burden. The marketplace handoff is strategically central but sequenced after I confirm resellers actually engage with disposal tracking at all.

The honest gap

The load-bearing finding is uncomfortable: there is no instrumentation, so I cannot currently measure whether the product works for anyone but me. That is why anonymous, privacy-first analytics is the first thing in, and it has to honor the "all data stays on your device" promise: aggregate only, no item names, no free text. Everything else, every KR baseline, every assumption about momentum and follow-through, is an argument until that ships and turns it into a measurement.