Why I am building Leovidly

I like building things. That's the honest starting point. Give me a problem I hit often enough and I'll eventually try to write software for it, whether or not anyone asked me to.

Before Leovidly, the thing I was building was Mealzine. It came from a frustration that never went away: there's no good diet or nutrition app built for what Nigerians and Africans actually eat. Open any of the popular ones and try to log jollof rice, or amala, or a plate of beans and plantain, and you're guessing. I wanted one database that had all of it. Everything we eat here, with real numbers behind it. That was the plan, and I was deep in it.

Then Kotlin Multiplatform went stable.

I'd been watching KMP for a while, and when it hit stable I made a quiet bet: this was where mobile and desktop were heading. Write your logic once, ship real native apps from it. I wanted to build something with it instead of just reading about it. The problem was I didn't have a reason to, and I don't learn well without a reason.

The reason was sitting in my own workflow. Around then I was posting on my YouTube channel and hating it. Not the making of videos. Everything around the making of videos. It was slow and disorganised. I'd post, go quiet for weeks, post again. And the whole time I kept noticing how much of it was work a computer should be doing for me. Finding B-roll. Downloading it. Renaming files so I could find them again. Dragging things into the right folders. None of it needed a person.

So I made a small deal with myself. I'd use this as the excuse to learn KMP desktop: build a little tool that pulled B-roll and kept my folders in order, spend two or three months on it, then go back to Mealzine. That was the whole scope. A personal utility. A weekend project that ran a little long.

It did not stay small.

The moment the first piece worked, I could see the next one. If it can find B-roll, it can line the B-roll up with my script. If it's already reading my script, it can help me write the script. Every feature I finished handed me two more that suddenly felt obvious. I'd solve a problem and the solving would open three more, and somewhere in there the two-month tool became the thing I opened every weekend, and most evenings after work.

At some point it was good enough that I thought my siblings could use it. That’s where it stopped being a private script. To put it on someone else’s machine I had to sign the app and go through the whole set of steps that turn “works on mine” into “works on theirs.” That’s a small sentence for a genuinely annoying amount of work. But once it was done, the app could leave my computer.

And that moved the question. If my siblings can run it, why not a friend? And if a friend, why not a stranger on the internet with the exact problem I’d started with?

That thought is where Leovidly actually began. Not the app I'd built for myself, but something people I'd never meet could pay for and depend on. I don't think I understood at the time how far apart those two things are. An app for you can be held together with duct tape, as long as you remember where you put the tape. An app for paying users can't. All of it gets heavier: the edge cases, the polish, the support, the long list of things that have nothing to do with writing code. I'd walked into a different project without noticing I'd left the last one.

Mealzine is still waiting, by the way. Maybe I’ll get back to it one day. Maybe.

But that's the honest story of how Leovidly started. I tried to save myself a few hours a week, followed the thread past the point where I'd meant to stop, and looked up to find I'd built a product. And I'm still in it. Most weeks I'm adding a feature, fixing a bug, or just working inside the app the way I did on day one. It isn't a finished thing I walked away from. I'm still building it, one problem at a time.