Notion Habit Heroes wasn't planned. It started in February 2023 as a duct-tape script with exactly one user: me. Over three and a half years of nights and weekends it grew into the habit tracker you can connect to your own Notion workspace today. I'm Lucas, the solo developer behind it, and this is the honest version of how it happened: the pivot, the algorithm that took six rewrites, the payment system I built three times, and the outage I didn't notice for three months.
It started with duct tape
In early 2023 my habits lived in Notion, one row per day, one checkbox per habit. But checking a box in a database is not exactly thrilling. I missed game mechanics: points, streaks, a reason to care beyond willpower. Habitica had those, so I did what developers do instead of solving the actual problem: I built a bridge. A small service forwarded my Notion tasks to Habitica and synced completions back.
It worked, mostly. But within two months I was spending more time reconciling two systems than building habits. Around April 2023 the obvious question finally landed: why sync my checkboxes into someone else's game when I could build the game around the checkboxes? I deleted the bridge and wrote my own points system instead. That one decision is the product you're looking at today.
Building the fun parts first
May 2023 was the month it became a real app rather than a personal script: user accounts, then the official Notion OAuth connection so anyone could plug in their own database, then the first widget you could embed straight into a Notion page. And, in the same month, a leaderboard, because from the very beginning the point was never just tracking my own habits. It was competing with my friends. Nothing gets you to the gym on a rainy Tuesday like a friend sitting two points ahead of you.
Six rewrites of one streak algorithm
Streaks sound trivial: count the consecutive days, reset on a miss. The first version shipped in September 2023. Then reality arrived. My commit history from that winter reads like a diary of humility: "corrected streak calc", "fix streak calc algo", "refac streak algo". It took six rewrites before the algorithm survived contact with real journals, where days get skipped, entries get edited after the fact, and midnight happens at a different moment for every user on the planet.
The lesson stuck with me: the features that look simplest are the ones users trust the most, so they are exactly the ones you cannot get almost right.
The parts nobody sees
Most of the roughly 475 commits in the project's history aren't features. They're the invisible machinery that makes a habit tracker trustworthy: a nightly sync that runs in each user's own timezone, and a 3 a.m. self-healing check that finds anything that failed overnight and quietly re-runs it. A missed sync isn't just a bug in this product. It's a broken streak someone earned. That's why reliability work always wins the priority fight.
And then there was getting paid. I started on payments in early 2025 and the git history shows three separate attempts at a payment system before Stripe finally went live on New Year's Day 2026. It took almost three years from the first commit until the app could take anyone's money. As a solo developer you learn that shipping the checkout button is easy; being confident enough in subscriptions, cancellations, and edge cases to take a stranger's card takes far longer.
The three-month silent failure
In spring 2026 my email provider locked my account without telling me. The cruel part: their mail server kept cheerfully accepting every confirmation email and password reset, reported "sent", and delivered none of them. For about three months, new users heard nothing back and I saw no errors at all.
That one hurt, and it taught me the most important operational lesson of the whole project: "no errors" is not the same as "working". Today a daily monitor reconciles every email the app believes it sent against what was actually delivered, and it alerts me on any gap. I only trust what I can verify.
What 475 commits taught me about habits
An app about consistency was built in three and a half years of wildly inconsistent evenings, and I do see the irony. Some months I made five commits, some months fifty. What kept it alive was never motivation. It was the same mechanics the app now offers its users: a visible streak, points that make progress feel real, and friends who notice when you stop showing up.
I didn't build Notion Habit Heroes because I'm naturally disciplined. I built it because I'm not, and I needed the game.
Getting started
If your habits already live in Notion, you can see what NH2 adds in a few minutes: connect your habit database and get automatic nightly sync, streaks, points, and widgets you can embed right on your Notion pages. Here's how it works, and the core features are on the free plan, so create an account and try it. When you're ready to drag your friends into it, challenges and shared leaderboards are on the Pro plan.