80 Seconds: The First Installment

How It Started

Over two years ago I made 80 Seconds to help me with crushing anxiety. I had developed it over the years while being the face behind a beauty brand. I searched for ways to help me deal with this new part of my life and found positive affirmations. I had heard of them in passing before but never acknowledged them because I thought it was silly. How can reading words help me feel better? I came across a study, “Self-affirmation activates brain systems associated with self-related processing and reward and is reinforced by future orientation” by Christopher N. Cascio et. al, in which they have found that self-affirmations do work. I continued to search and found even more studies that all corroborated what they’ve discovered, “[w]hen threatened, self-affirmations can restore self-competence by allowing individuals to reflect on sources of self-worth, such as core values.” It made absolute sense that this was true because a lot of my anxiety stemmed from seeing criticism about me or my brand. I was sold!

Creating 80 Seconds

Once I delved into the world of affirmations, I was floored at how it changed my mood so quickly. I immediately sought out affirmation apps, but one of the things I didn’t like about most of them was that they were convoluted. There were too many distractions in terms of choice and I would spend a lot of time figuring out how to customize the apps instead of using them. It was time to make my own app. After taking a course on Codecademy, SwiftUI and I became best of friends. I made a simple UI where the BEGIN button would take me to a breathing exercise to help calm me, then to one minute of positive affirmations that would splash across the screen every 5 seconds, and then to another breathing exercise. That is how 80 Seconds got its name! After getting the app approved by the App Store, I started to notice other people downloading my app with zero promotion. I was excited.

Creating 80 Seconds Plus

As time went on, a few people reached out asking if I could expand the content matter in 80 Seconds. They wanted to delve into different categories, so I created 80 Seconds Plus. 80 Seconds Plus was the paid version of the original app. Those people bought the app, along with a slew of others. It was insane because we’ve always heard that people do not pay for apps, yet I was getting sales.

Pivoting to 80 Seconds

While creating 80 Seconds, I was programming a social media/dating app called Vollyy. I launched that app on Product Hunt with little fanfare, but I continuously received emails about 80 Seconds and how the app helped them, or from influencers asking to promote it. People were loving the app, and I started to wonder if I should pivot into the self-care space. I enjoyed creating the affirmations and the app and loved that it helped people. Creating Vollyy was my way of trying to help people connect in real life, but I started to think about how I could help people make their everyday lives better. So I focused more on 80 Seconds.

Adding more to 80 Seconds

Once my focus shifted to 80 Seconds, I created MacOS, iOS, Android, and Amazon App Store apps. It was a long journey to create these apps as I had to learn both Swift and Kotlin to achieve this feat. I wanted to continue to keep 80 Seconds as uncomplicated as possible, but I added these key features:

Many of the people who have downloaded the app have reached out and are excited about the massive update! Just reading those emails made me so proud of how far I’ve come.

Now What?

So after creating 80 Seconds, my focus is now on creating journals about gratitude and affirmations. These journals will follow the same principle of being simple and uncluttered so the user can concentrate only on their thoughts and words. I love writing and it’s amazing how this new journey lets me express myself. Amazing how life works, right?