We Forgot Dark Winds. So I Built StreamTracker.

A few months back, my wife and I were out to dinner on a Friday night with friends. They asked us what we were watching. We asked them. Somewhere in the conversation, Dark Winds came up.

We had watched three seasons of Dark Winds. Loved it. When the new season aired earlier this year, we started watching, then went away for a couple weeks, and just… forgot. By the time it came up at dinner, the season had been out for nearly a month. We had missed it.

On the drive home, my wife and I looked at each other and said the same thing at the same time:

This is the story of what happened next.

"Do we have anything to watch tonight, honey?"

Here's how it played out at our house, basically every night.

Early evening. The day winding down. Ready to shut down devices and turn on the TV. And my wife would say, almost exactly the same way every time:

And I'd flip between every streaming app we pay for — Netflix, Hulu, Apple TV+, Max, Disney+, Prime Video — trying to figure out what was new, what we were in the middle of, what we'd been meaning to start. By the time I'd checked them all, we'd lost the appetite to watch anything.

I started thinking — this isn't just us. This is playing out in millions of households across the country, right now, tonight. There has to be a better way.

I looked at what was out there. It wasn't built for me.

Before I started building anything, I looked at the apps that already exist. TV Time. Reelgood. Next Episode. A few others. Some of them are well-built. Some have huge user bases.

But honestly? They weren't what I wanted.

I'm not interested in a community. I don't want to share what I'm watching with strangers. I don't want ratings, reactions, a feed, recommendations, or "you'd like this because you watched that."

I wanted one thing: be reminded each morning, with a single notification, about the shows I watch that are on that day.

That's it. Not a watchlist. Not a discovery hub. Not a calendar. One notification. Then get on with my day.

What I deliberately left out

Once I was clear about the one job, I had to be just as clear about what didn't belong in the app.

A number of people suggested I include movies. I said no. Movies are a one-time thing — you know the movie you want to watch, and you watch it. There's no schedule. There's no "Tuesday is Dark Winds night." Movies don't fit into a daily reminder app.

We all have repeating patterns. Routines. The shows we follow are part of our routine — they air on certain days, they drop new episodes on certain platforms. StreamTracker is built to flow into those routines, not to add a new thing you have to manage. The morning notification arrives. You glance at it. If there's something on tonight, you know. If there isn't, you also know. Either way, no thinking required.

That was the whole point. Simplicity, on purpose.

Where this really started

I should back up.

I'm not new to building things. I founded a 401k consulting firm in 2013. We grew it to more than $2 billion in assets under management before I exited in August 2019. After the sale I stayed in the consulting side of the work and kept serving clients.

Then, in December of 2024, I had open heart surgery. The kind of operation that makes you take a long, honest look at the years you have left and what you want to do with them.

During recovery, I had something I hadn't had in a long time — time. Real time. Time to think. Time to read. Time to learn something completely new.

That's when I dove into AI.

Not as a business project. Not because anyone told me to. Just because I had time, and I'd been hearing a revolution was happening, and I wanted to see what it actually was — for myself, with my own hands.

A year later, sitting at that Friday dinner when Dark Winds came up, I had two things I didn't have before. I had the tools. And — after the surgery — I had a sharper sense of what was worth my remaining time. Building something that solved a real problem for real people made the cut.

This isn't a heart-surgery story. It's a what-you-do-with-the-time-you-have-left story. The app is almost incidental — it's just the proof.

From dinner conversation to App Store

On the way home from that Friday dinner — the one where Dark Winds came up — I told my wife: "I've been studying and using AI for nearly a year now. I keep hearing how non-programmers can actually build software with the tools that exist today. I'm going to try."

The next morning, Saturday, I logged into Claude Code and started describing what I wanted. I've never written a line of code in my life. But I knew exactly what I wanted the app to do — because I'd been the user wishing it existed.

That got the ball rolling.

First Claude. Then design — what should it look like, what should the notification say, what colors. Then I joined the Apple Developer Program. Me. A developer. Really? Then back-and-forth with Apple's Xcode platform, learning how to build, test, iterate. Then submitting the app to Apple for review.

Three rejections. Mostly for little things I had no idea I had to fill out — privacy disclosures, metadata fields, screenshots in specific sizes. Each rejection felt like a punch. Then a fix. Then another submission. Then waiting.

After nearly four weeks, on a Thursday night at 10:37 PM, the approval came through.

It felt like having a baby. I'm not exaggerating. I had taken an idea — just an idea, in my head, from a dinner conversation — and turned it into a real product, approved by a trillion-dollar company, available to the public.

It was the most exciting, challenging, frustrating, humbling, and rewarding experience I've had in a long time.

Who StreamTracker is actually for

People of all ages who are tired of the busy-ness of life.

This isn't a young-person problem. It isn't an old-person problem. It's a busy-person problem. Anyone watching shows on three or more streaming services has the same friction we had. Everyone's life is full. Nobody needs another app that demands attention.

StreamTracker doesn't demand attention. The morning notification arrives. You leave it on your home screen. When you're ready to turn on the TV that night, there it is — the answer to "do we have anything to watch?" — already on your phone. No searching. No app to open. No flipping between Netflix and Hulu and Max.

That's what I wanted as a user. That's what I built as a founder.

What I want you to take away from this

Three things.

One. If you have an idea, no matter your age, with the technology available to all of us right now — go for it. I'm not promising you'll sell a million copies. I have no idea what StreamTracker will do. What I do know is that I had an idea on a Friday night, I started building on Saturday morning, and a few weeks later real people were using the thing I made. The gap between "I wish someone would build this" and "I built this" is the smallest it has ever been. Use that.

Two. Simple equals usable. StreamTracker has no manual. Three clicks and you're in, you're using it. That was the entire design goal. Every app I've ever stopped using was an app that demanded too much of me. I refused to build one of those.

Three. What I'd actually love is this — the next time you're out with friends at dinner and someone asks "what are you watching lately," I want you to pull out your phone, open StreamTracker, and say: "You should try this. You don't need to text yourself reminders or write the show down in Notes. Just download this. Never miss a show again." And maybe your friend says back: "Thanks. You just solved a problem I've been having for years."

I'll toast to that.