I Built Nifl Because I Was Terrible at Planning
Nifl started as a personal tool for me and my girlfriend. Here's the honest story of why I built it, how it grew, and what I want it to become.
I am, by nature, a terrible planner.
Not because I don't care about the things I want to do — quite the opposite. I care a lot. I see something on TikTok and I genuinely think "I want to go there." I screenshot it. I bookmark it. I make a mental note. And then life moves on and the intention evaporates, buried under hundreds of other bookmarks that all started with the same level of excitement.
For a long time I thought this was just a personal failing. A character flaw I needed to work around.
It isn't. But it took building an app to fully understand that.
The Problem Was Real — and It Was Mine
I have ADHD. Planning — the kind that requires holding multiple pieces of information together, thinking across time, turning a vague intention into a concrete action — is genuinely hard for me. It's not laziness. It's that the mental overhead of organising plans feels disproportionately heavy, and when something feels that heavy, you avoid it.
So I'd scroll through social media and find interesting places. Restaurants I wanted to try. Areas I wanted to explore. Things I wanted to do with my girlfriend, with my friends. I'd save them wherever felt easiest in the moment — a TikTok bookmark, a screenshot in my camera roll, a note that would get buried. And that's where they'd stay.
When it came to actually planning something — for myself, for my girlfriend, for a group of friends — I'd freeze. Too many half-remembered ideas in too many places, no way to make sense of them, no easy path from "I want to do something" to "here's what we're doing."
The plans never quite came together the way I wanted them to. Not because I didn't have ideas. Because I had no system to hold them.
I Wasn't the Only One
The first thing I did when I started feeling this frustration clearly was talk to my girlfriend about it. It turned out she had exactly the same problem. Different version, same root cause — saved places going nowhere, plans that never quite materialised, the vague sense that there were things you meant to do that just never happened.
That conversation stuck with me. If two people in the same household had this problem independently, it wasn't a quirk. It was a gap.
I Built It for Two People
I'm a software engineer. I build scalable applications professionally — currently at Sainsbury's, where customer feedback and genuine user satisfaction sits at the core of everything we ship. I've built personal tools before. A few of them failed. But I understood enough about building to know that the fastest way to test whether something solves a problem is to build a rough version and use it yourself.
So that's what I did.
The first version of what became Nifl was basic. A map view. A way to save places and organise them into collections. Nothing polished, nothing public — just a working tool for me and my girlfriend to use.
It worked. Not perfectly, but well enough that the problem we'd both been living with started to feel manageable. Places we saved actually had somewhere to live. When we wanted to plan something, we had a starting point instead of a blank page.
That was enough to keep going.
The Moment It Became More Than a Personal Tool
I showed it to some friends, mostly just to get their take. I wasn't pitching anything. I wasn't thinking about an App Store launch. I just wanted to know if the thing I'd built for two people made sense to anyone else.
Their reaction surprised me.
They got it immediately — not just the basic concept of saving places, but the specific features that had made it work for us. The ability to organise pins the way you actually think about plans — "dinner in Sheffield", "drinks in Hackney", "things to do with Mum when she visits" — rather than just dumping everything into one undifferentiated list. And particularly the share feature, where you can share a TikTok video directly to Nifl and have the place extracted automatically from the content. That one landed differently than I expected. Because everyone had experienced exactly that moment — finding somewhere on TikTok and losing it forever.
It was the first time I thought this might be useful to more than two people.
Building It Into Something Real
From that rough first version, Nifl has grown significantly. The map and collections are still at the core, but the app now does what it was always really meant to do — not just help you save places, but actually help you go to them.
The Calendar feature lets you schedule any saved place to a specific date and time, and sync it directly to your Apple Calendar. Quick routing shows you how far a place is from where you are right now and lets you start navigation directly through Google Maps or Apple Maps. Proximity notifications remind you quietly when you're near somewhere you've saved, so a place doesn't have to wait until you remember it — it finds you when you're close.
We also made it a shared experience. You can see other people's public collections on the map — not as a feed to scroll, but as a form of quiet inspiration. A way to discover how other people think about places in a city, and save what resonates with you.
Before Nifl ever reached the App Store, we had early users testing it. The feedback was consistent — the pain point was real, the value was real, and people wanted to keep using it. That validation mattered more than I expected. I'd built something to solve my own problem, and it turned out the problem was worth solving at scale.
What Nifl Has Done for Me Personally
Me and my girlfriend love going out. Experiencing new places, trying new things, exploring cities properly rather than just passing through them. Nifl has genuinely made that easier.
Not because it does the planning for us. But because it removes the overwhelming part — the friction between "I want to do something" and actually doing it. The places are already saved. The options are already organised. When the moment feels right, everything is ready.
That shift — from overwhelmed to calm, from vague intention to actual plan — is what I wanted Nifl to feel like. And on the days it works the way I intended, it does.
Why I Decided to Take It Public
Honestly? I wasn't expecting anyone outside my immediate circle to use this.
I built it for me and my girlfriend. That it worked for us was enough. The fact that friends responded the way they did, that early testers found genuine value in it, that the problem resonated with people I'd never met — that was unexpected. And it was motivating in a way I didn't fully anticipate.
I've built things before that didn't find their audience. This one felt different. The pain point was specific enough to be real and common enough to matter. The solution was clear. And I had the experience, from years of building products at scale, to know how to take something from working for two people to working for many more.
So I kept building.
What I Want Nifl to Become
Not a navigation app. Not a review platform. Not another list that gathers digital dust.
I want Nifl to be the app you pull out when you find yourself in a city with no plans and you need somewhere to start. The app that makes you a better planner without making planning feel like work. The app that quietly holds your intentions until you're ready to act on them — and then gets out of the way.
Mostly I want it to remove the overwhelming feeling that comes with trying to organise the things you actually want to do. Because that feeling is what stops people. Not lack of ideas. Not lack of interest. Just the friction between intention and action.
Nifl is my attempt to close that gap.
If any of this sounds familiar — if you're the person in your group who always means to organise something but never quite gets there — Nifl was built for you.
Download Nifl on the App Store →
Or if you want to follow along as we keep building it, join the Nifl Community on Discord →.
— Daniel, founder of Nifl