Before Us

Overview

Before Us began as an experiment: could I use emerging AI tools to move beyond designing interfaces and build a complete application myself?

What started as a generalized motivational product called Daily Uplift eventually became something more focused — a mobile experience centered on the words, wisdom, and lived experiences of Black historical and cultural figures.

Over three months, I directed the strategy, user experience, visual design, brand, content, and product decisions while using AI as a technical partner. The process took me from an idea and a set of Figma screens to my first app in the App Store.

Learning to become a builder

I handled strategy, UX, and visual design while using AI tools to cross the gap between design and engineering. In the first phase I mostly used Cursor and Augment Code to develop the application. Eventually I had a working experience I could test on my phone:

Open the app → view the daily quote.

It was a simple interaction, but seeing it run on an actual device was groundbreaking for me.

One reason many designers never release their own applications is that they don't have an engineering partner, or don't believe they have enough technical knowledge to build the product themselves. AI-assisted development let me test whether that limitation still had to exist.

Along the way I learned GitHub, Next.js, React-based mobile development, Firebase, Firestore, authentication, OpenAI integrations, Vercel, Xcode, and app deployment. I had seen GitHub through engineers at previous companies and assumed it was mainly where engineers updated code. Building Before Us made it part of my own creative workflow.

I also began to understand prompting as a form of problem-solving. AI couldn't help me unless I could diagnose the current problem, describe the intended behavior, and judge whether the proposed solution was right.

Working within technical constraints

The biggest technical constraint was my hardware. My MacBook Air kept running low on storage and memory with Xcode, Cursor, and the project's packages all running. I had to manage resources continuously and move files to external drives to keep going.

The process was often exhausting, but it was exciting too. The first time the app worked, I felt the same disbelief I had after building my first website: I took an idea that existed in my head and made it real.

To hold continuity across a technically complicated process, I used Notion as a development journal. At the end of a session I asked Cursor to summarize what we finished, what broke, and what we decided, then saved those summaries in a master document. The journal let me resume work without losing technical or product context.

Recognizing that the idea was too broad

I stepped away from Daily Uplift and came back to it months later. The concept didn't feel distinctive enough. The motivational-app market was already crowded, and Daily Uplift had several interesting features but no clear reason to exist beyond daily encouragement.

I was also conflicted about monetization. Many motivational apps charge for premium content, but I kept thinking: these are just quotes. Who am I to put a price on words I did not create? That question showed me I was thinking too narrowly. People wouldn't be paying for individual quotations — they would be paying for the experience, the curation, and the personalization around them.

Even so, the name never excited me. And the answer was already inside the product: one of Daily Uplift's highlighted themes was Black Excellence. It was a small category within a broad product, and it felt more meaningful than everything around it. Instead of treating Black wisdom as one theme among many, I made it the foundation.

The pivot

The product moved from a generalized motivational app to an experience centered on Black American quotations, history, and wisdom, for Black Americans and the wider Black diaspora. Few apps centered Black voices and stories this way, and the direction felt purposeful.

The pivot didn't require throwing out what I had built. Quotes had always been the heart of the experience. The most important change wasn't structural — it was conceptual. I moved from a general inspiration app containing a Black Excellence category to a culturally focused product built around Black voices, experiences, and wisdom.

I wanted each quotation to create a moment of reflection, observation, or conversation. One day a friend came across Maya Angelou's reflection on how people remember the way they were made to feel, and we talked briefly about how it related to something happening in his own life. That small interaction is what I wanted Before Us to do. The product didn't need an elaborate engagement loop. Sometimes its job is to create a meaningful pause.

Before Us isn't just a quote app. It turns Black wisdom into moments of reflection, conversation, and connection.

From Daily Uplift to Before Us

The name Daily Uplift no longer fit. It was generic, already claimed in the App Store, and disconnected from the app's cultural purpose. I explored alternatives — Kindred Words, Kin Voice, Front Porch, Passed Down, Root Notes — and many of the strongest options were already registered or otherwise unavailable.

Eventually I arrived at Before Us. The name stands for the people whose words, wisdom, and experiences carried us forward. It reflects the tradition of looking back, preserving knowledge, and passing it on. It carries a light contemporary echo of Kendrick Lamar's “Not Like Us,” but its deeper meaning comes from ancestry and continuity.

For the first time, I was genuinely excited by the product's name. It set Before Us apart in a crowded category and gave the experience a worldview rather than a description of its function.

Designing the identity

The identity needed to feel contemporary, professional, and culturally intentional without leaning on familiar visual clichés. I deliberately avoided reaching for Pan-African colors just because the product centered Black people; I wanted the brand to develop its own visual language.

The final portal-inspired logo stands for ancestry and continuity. It suggests entering a space where knowledge can be retrieved, experienced, and passed forward — which felt more aligned with the app's purpose than the other concepts.

The website and the application didn't need to mirror each other exactly, but they needed to feel like parts of the same world. The logo, typography, color relationships, and tone carry that connection across both.

Designing with restraint

The original Daily Uplift experience opened on a traditional home screen with a daily quote, mood tracking, and highlighted themes. Once mood tracking was gone and the content narrowed to Black wisdom, that home screen no longer served a clear purpose. Rather than keep it because it already existed, I streamlined the journey:

Open the app → discover a quote → learn about the person → save, share, or continue.

I focused on color balance, alignment, hierarchy, typography, and whitespace. I wanted the interface quiet enough for the words to stay central. It is a quote app, not Facebook. Playfair Display gives the quotations an editorial, reflective quality, while DM Sans Light keeps the rest of the interface clean and contemporary. There is little imagery in the first release, and that restraint was intentional — later versions may add visuals where they carry meaning rather than decoration.

Testing the experience

Before release I shared the app with people close to me, including my partner. I wanted to know whether someone could understand the product, complete onboarding, and discover and navigate the library without instructions.

Testing surfaced two notable issues:

1. People paused at the reminder-setting step during onboarding, which suggested that either the action or its value wasn't clear enough.
2. Some people didn't realize they could scroll past the first quotation. Without a visual cue, the library looked smaller than it was.

The original Daily Uplift concept never reached the App Store or gathered enough testing to offer a meaningful comparison, so the decision to pivot rested on my own strategic and creative judgment rather than validated demand. That is an important distinction. Early reactions to Before Us were encouraging, and releasing it created the chance to gather stronger behavioral evidence over time.

Knowing when to ship

From concept to App Store submission, the project took roughly two to three months. As the product got closer to the vision in my head, I regularly asked Claude to evaluate its readiness and name what was left before I could submit.

Testing and configuring the supporting infrastructure — Firebase in particular — were among the hardest parts. Designing an interface was familiar territory. Preparing a dependable product made me think harder about authentication, data, failure states, and technical behavior.

I knew the app was ready when I could no longer find a major issue standing between someone and the core experience. My feedback had shifted from solving real problems to making increasingly minor adjustments. I was becoming nitpicky, and more polish would only postpone the chance to learn from a real release.

Responding to rejection

My first App Store submission was rejected: Apple wanted additional documentation showing how the app worked, including account creation and login. I created the walkthrough and resubmitted.

Instead of reading the rejection as evidence that I didn't belong in this space, I treated it as one more unfamiliar part of shipping that I needed to understand. Submitting my first app gave me an enormous sense of accomplishment. I took an idea from my head, shaped its strategy and identity, worked through technical constraints, and turned it into a real product other people could use.

What I learned

The most important decision I made was narrowing the product from generalized encouragement to Black American wisdom. Daily Uplift might have performed well as a motivational product, but I don't know whether it would have held my interest. Before Us gave me a reason to keep building after the original technical experiment was over.

I also learned that an interesting feature doesn't automatically make a meaningful product. Mood tracking, journaling, themes, and AI-generated context were all viable, but together they competed with the central experience. If a feature adds complexity at the expense of clarity, it may not deserve to be there, however interesting it is on its own.

AI accelerated the engineering, the troubleshooting, and the navigation of unfamiliar technical requirements. My judgment stayed essential to defining the product's purpose, shaping its visual direction, finding edge cases, reviewing content, and deciding what to remove.

If I started again, I would spend more time sketching and wireframing before producing polished screens. AI makes it tempting to jump straight to high-fidelity output, but speed can hide structural problems. Just because I can produce full screens quickly does not mean I should — establishing the structure and interaction model earlier would have prevented real rework later.

What comes next

The immediate priority is expanding the quotation library and improving its representation and verification.

I am also exploring ways to visualize connections among people, ideas, themes, eras, and movements — not visualization as decoration, but as a way to help people see relationships within Black history and thought that are hard to catch through a single quote. Any future feature has to strengthen the core experience without giving up the restraint that made the product clearer.

From designer to builder

Before Us shows that I can recognize when a concept lacks focus, refine its purpose, and simplify an experience around its most meaningful interaction. It reflects attention to typography, spacing, hierarchy, balance, and the emotional effect of design — and, more importantly, it shows the difference between adding features and building a product people understand immediately.

As a creative technologist, the project demonstrates determination, independence, adaptability, and resourcefulness. I am willing to learn unfamiliar tools, work through technical constraints, and use the best resources available to move an idea forward.

It also changed how I think about pivoting. A pivot is not necessarily evidence that the original idea failed. Sometimes it is evidence that you understand the product more clearly than when you began.