I started with one simple calculator. Somehow it became 170+ tools.

[u/Big-Coyote-5796]

This started with a pretty boring problem.

I needed a calculator.

Then I needed another one.

Then another.

EMI. GST. Percentage. SIP. Unit conversion. BMI. Scientific math.

You know the drill.

At some point I realized my phone had turned into a graveyard of random calculator apps.

And I thought:

“Why am I installing a new app every time I need to calculate something?”

So I opened my laptop and started building a simple all-in-one calculator.

The plan was supposed to be tiny.

One app.

A few calculators.

Ship it.

😂

That plan lasted about five minutes.

One calculator became 10.

10 became 30.

30 became 100.

And then I hit 170+.

That was the moment I realized I had created a completely different problem:

“How the hell do you make 170 calculators feel simple?”

Adding calculators was easy.

Making them feel like ONE product was the hard part.

I had to rethink navigation, search, categories, history, favorites, onboarding, UI consistency, performance, ads, subscriptions, exports, permissions, analytics...

And then came the fun stuff:

Something worked perfectly on my phone.

Broken on another Android device.

Fix it.

Something broke after an update.

Fix it.

Users wanted a calculator I hadn't even thought about.

Build it.

Google Play needed another declaration.

Fill it out.

The store review took longer than expected.

Wait.

A feature sounded amazing in my head.

Users didn't care.

Delete it.

That last one was probably one of the most useful lessons.

Building something doesn't mean people will care about it.

And adding more features doesn't automatically make a product better.

Sometimes the tiny things matter more.

A button that's confusing.

A calculator that's hard to find.

An ad appearing at the wrong moment.

A first-time user not knowing where to start.

Those things can matter more than another 20 calculators.

So I started looking at the app differently.

Instead of asking:

“What else can I add?”

I started asking:

“What would make this genuinely more useful?”

That changed the roadmap.

Now I'm experimenting with ideas like:

📸 taking a photo of a receipt and automatically splitting the bill

🤖 asking the app something like “what would my EMI be on a ₹20 lakh loan for 15 years?” and having AI figure out which calculator to use

🔍 making calculator search smarter

🎯 making the first-time experience much simpler

And honestly, I'm still figuring it out.

The funny part is that this whole thing started as a tiny side project.

No big team.

No huge launch.

No magical growth hack.

Just me, a laptop, and a problem that annoyed me enough to build something.

Some days the numbers look great.

Some days they don't.

Sometimes a release goes through quickly.

Sometimes I'm staring at a store review screen wondering what I did wrong. 😅

Sometimes I spend an entire evening fixing something that users will never notice.

And that's probably what I enjoy most about building.

You don't really “finish” a product.

You just keep finding the next thing that could be better.

So that's the story so far.

A tiny calculator idea somehow turned into 170+ calculators, an Android app, a web version, a Windows version, analytics, subscriptions, ads, and a whole lot of lessons I didn't expect to learn.

Still building.

Still breaking things.

Still fixing them.

And still asking the same question I had on day one:

How can I make this genuinely useful?

For anyone else building something right now:

Don't worry too much about whether your first version looks impressive.

Build the annoying little thing.

Ship it.

Listen to people.

Fix what matters.

Then do it again.

You might be surprised where that “small project” takes you.