Wheeli
Supercharge your personal growth journey
Team involved
César Álvarez
Design Director
Ana Menacho
Team Lead & Front-end Developer
Antonio Benítez
Team Lead & Back-end Developer
RECOGNITIONS
Looking for growth and balance
Life is a spinning wheel of moments. Some stick with us forever, while others fade quickly. What truly matters is how we track the memories that bring us fulfillment, helping us become our best selves.
Whee.li is a digital product that lends you a hand with your personal growth, and the search for balance across all the dimensions of your life. Born from entrepreneur and data specialist Matt Stein's journey of self-discovery, Whee.li is the answer to the sacrifices he made for his career—sacrifices that left crucial areas like family, health, and finances neglected.
Matt immersed himself in podcasts about growth and personal improvement, hired a dedicated coach, and devoured the work of behavioral scientists like Carol Dweck, Angela Duckworth, and Katy Milkman.
He realized he needed to create a tool to measure his progress toward a more balanced existence, so the founder embarked on a nights-and-weekends passion project based on the wheel of life concept: each category influences the others, so it's important to create balance.
He started to reflect, track and score moments of his life by creating a system of spreadsheets until it evolved into an app he hacked together using AppSheet. Over time, he began seeing amazing results but he needed help to boost his MVP.
“If you haven't created an app before, it can be hard to know where to start. Z1 has all the right skills in a single organization - designers, product managers, engineers, testers - and the know-how to help get your product to market.”
Matt Stein
Founder of Whee.li
The challenge
"In almost every aspect of life, good clean data is vital for success. Good data, however, requires the right tool to capture information quickly and use it for your benefit". Matt's statements built the foundation for Whee.li. As an entrepreneur, he also wondered, “Can I turn this DIY app into something with broader appeal and impact? And, how can I implement my vision of a dynamic wheel to measure progress?”
To solve these issues, Matt considered patching together various consultants via Upwork, but he finally got in touch with us. He knew our team of digital experts is focused on bringing projects from zero to one, so Z1 looked like the perfect fit.
The process
From our early conversations, we viewed Whee.li's success as our own. Since Matt has a very demanding full-time startup role, he only had around 15 min a week to focus on Whee. li during many time. Our flexibility, proactivity and patience were vital for the founder, who saw Whee.li as an important, yet nights-and-weekends passion side project.
The path towards Whee.li’s creation was long. It took more than two years to get it deployed to the AppStore, but we had fun along the way: we communicated according to Matt’s availability, mocking up his ideas as soon as he found time to provide feedback. As we iterated, Whee.li started coming to life.
“The Z1 team is truly patient, flexible, and friendly. This was my first mobile app, and Z1 always took the time to explain the basics to me and put the steps in context.”
Matt Stein
Founder of Whee.li
Hear it!
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The digital wheel of life
Matt describes himself as "somewhat of a perfectionist," so it was important that the product and website were not only functional but also visually appealing - colors, interactions, and language should flow harmonically. Our product designer Javi Pereira took care of every detail, crafting a UI following the logo that Matt had already designed for the product.
“We carefully chose the color palette in a range that matched not only the branding of the app but also that would represent the mood of the users. I put a lot of effort into designing a clear, straightforward, personal interface. For instance, the icons were manually drawn and not picked up from any library.”
Javier Pereira
Z1 Product designer
Privacy first
Matt was genuinely concerned about Whee.li's users' privacy, so we got to build a compelling yet very light app using Swift. It doesn't have a backend; it's an "offline" app, which means it doesn't store data on the cloud or any server, only in its users' phones while using only a few bytes of memory.
With Whee.li, your privacy and information is safe. If you ever need to restore the app or change devices, you can always get your info back thanks to a .zip file the app generates.
Main features
With Whee.li, you have access to a mighty tool to focus on the areas of your life you want to improve. Whee.li's framework lets you:
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Set your life categories
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Manage and track your goals
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Capture and reflect on moments
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Create positive feedback loops and check your balance
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Measure your fulfillment and effort every week
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Experiment with recommended approaches from research and the Whee.li community.
More than 100 users tested the app in the private beta. Their feedback taught Matt and us a lot; for example, some features the founder liked needed to be more intuitive to new subscribers and should be reworked, or how the tone of voice is crucial during onboarding to walk new subscribers through the app.
The idea of visualizing data showing progress with a dynamic wheel was in Matt's vision since the project's beginning, becoming the app's main feature and its soul.
The wheel, the hardest task
The wheel shows two parameters interactively and simultaneously: color and volume. It took effort to nail it because it has loads of computational logic behind it.
Despite the difficulties, we got an outstanding result that smoothly combines design and development. Thanks to Whee.li's wheel, you can quickly check your balance, measure your fulfillment and effort weekly and observe and manage trends over time at a glance.
Keep learning and growing
Whee.li aims to create a community of growth-minded people helping each other become better - in a highly curated way.
Regarding including new features, Matt admits the wheel has much potential beyond just life categories. He keeps an eye on the latest behavioral science findings, which will support keeping Whee.li’s framework up to date with the latest science-based trends.
Regarding including new features, Matt admits the wheel has much potential beyond just life categories. He keeps an eye on the latest behavioral science findings, which will support keeping Whee.li’s framework up to date with the latest science-based trends.
