The Story
Leo had been building the Motivation app for a few years before I came on board. The app delivered motivational quotes, something that resonated with people and had natural virality since quotes are the kind of thing people love to share.
When Apple announced that home screen widgets were coming to iOS, we started preparing immediately. As soon as the SDK was available, I started experimenting and had a working widget built early. Apple had announced a launch date for when widgets would go live in the App Store, and then last minute, they moved it up by a week.
Nobody else was ready. We were.
We launched on day one. The Motivation app was the first app in the App Store with a home screen widget. Combined with the app's existing organic virality, the downloads exploded. We hit #1 in the US App Store and saw millions of downloads in the period that followed. Our other app, IAM, climbed near the top as well.
NLP Personalization
Beyond the widget, I built a personalization system that made the quote experience smarter over time.
Initially, quotes were shown randomly. I built a scoring algorithm based on engagement analytics to surface the most popular quotes first. Then we took it further. I used natural language processing to vectorize quotes and applied cosine similarity to find quotes that were semantically related to ones a user had engaged with.
The result: as a user interacted with more quotes, the app learned what resonated with them and surfaced similar content. The experience became genuinely personalized. The quotes you saw were the ones most likely to move you.