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Part of the Waymark Product Story This is a follow-up build note to the main Waymark case study. Here, I focus on what changed after launch: what I improved, what I learned from the data, and how the product evolved through real use.
After the first release, I redesigned the core lesson experience, improved journaling, added Bible Search, introduced Bahasa Indonesia localization, refined App Store positioning, and used PostHog to understand where users were continuing or dropping off.
The clearest signal came from the lesson experience: after the v1.1.6 redesign, lesson completion increased from 38.46% to 48.94%.
The first version of Waymark helped me prove that I could take a personal pain point and turn it into a working product.
But once people started using it, I had to shift from “Can I build this?” to “Is this experience clear enough for people to keep using?”
That changed how I looked at the product.
I started paying closer attention to the journey after launch: where users started, where they stopped, what features they ignored, and which parts of the experience had potential to become more valuable.
Waymark became less of a one-time launch and more of a continuous product loop: build, observe, learn, improve.
Journal Verse Insertion
Expanded journal media and Bible verse insertion, improved recent search behavior, reduced bundled app assets, and refined the prayer experience.
Journal Camera And Media
Added custom camera and media picker support for journal entries, improved image handling, refreshed widgets, and fixed Today completion sync.
Bible Search And Reading Controls
Added Bible Search, lesson text-size controls, provider fallbacks, and cleaner search navigation.
Localization And Lesson Refinement
Added Bahasa Indonesia localization, expanded the lesson redesign, and introduced customizable Reflection and Prayer order in the Today journey.
Calmer Onboarding Experience
Polished the welcome flow with calmer motion, refined illustrations, and smoother slide transitions.
Journey Tracking Foundation
Added stronger tracking for the Today journey, lesson progress, reflection, journaling, prayer, and reliability.
Step-By-Step Lesson Journey
Redesigned the lesson journey into a more guided flow from reading the passage to understanding, reflection, and prayer.
Guided Lesson Prayer
Added a guided prayer before each lesson to help users slow down and prepare before reading.
Bug Reports And Push Fixes
Added in-app bug reporting and fixed an issue where some users were not receiving push notifications.
First Major Product Upgrade
Redesigned the home and Today experience, rebuilt the journal, added book progress, widgets, dark mode, reminders, offline support, and a clearer reading flow.
Stability Improvements
Resolved early issues and improved app stability as Waymark continued learning from its first users.
First Public Release
Released the first version of Waymark, turning a personal faith friction into a working product with guided lessons, reflection, prayer, and journaling.
One of the biggest changes was the interface upgrade.
The Today tab is the first screen users see when they open Waymark. The actions were already clear, but visually, it did not feel as strong as the product needed to be. I wanted the experience to feel calmer, more premium, and more emotionally aligned with the kind of space people enter when they read Scripture.
So I redesigned the Today experience to feel more intentional and inviting.
The lesson experience also needed work.
In the earlier version, lessons felt more like a long article. The content was useful, but the format could feel heavy. PostHog also showed that users were starting lessons, but not always completing them.
That told me the issue was not only visual polish. It was a UX problem.
I changed the lesson experience into a page-by-page flow, so users could move through the lesson section by section. The goal was to make reading feel lighter, reduce overwhelm, and help users feel progress as they moved through the content.
I also improved the prayer experience because it sits close to the lesson journey. If Waymark asks users to move from reading to prayer, that moment needs to feel calm and natural, not like another task to complete.
The update made the prayer screen feel more focused and intentional, with clearer hierarchy and a more supportive writing space. It helped the end of the journey feel less abrupt and gave users a better transition from learning into personal reflection.
This upgrade was not just about making Waymark look better. It was about reducing friction in the core experience.
The journal started as a secondary feature, but over time I began to see its potential as one of Waymark’s strongest product moments.
Faith is not only something people read about. It is something they process, remember, question, and return to. That made journaling more important than I originally treated it.
I redesigned the journal writing experience so it felt closer to writing notes in a notebook, with guided lines and a calmer layout.
I also added photo attachments, with a custom camera and media picker.
That decision came from real-world use. During church, I realized I often wanted to capture something from the screen, but I was not sitting close enough for the text to be clear. The first camera experience did not support that well, so I added 2x zoom to make capturing sermon slides more useful.
Another friction point came from adding Bible passages into journal notes.
Previously, if I wanted to include a verse from a sermon, I had to leave the journal, search for the passage, screenshot it, return to the journal, and attach it manually. That was too much interruption during a service.
So I added Bible passage search directly inside the journal.
Now users can search for a verse and insert it without leaving the note. The goal is simple: less distraction, more focus on listening, reflecting, and capturing what matters.
Waymark originally helped users find lessons based on how they were feeling. That was still important, but it was not the only way people look for spiritual guidance.
Some users already have a verse in front of them. They may be reading a physical Bible, hearing a passage during church, or coming across a verse somewhere else and wanting to understand it more deeply.
That led me to build Bible Search.
For English, Waymark uses NLT. For Indonesian search, the experience currently uses AGS through YouVersion while I continue exploring the ideal Bible provider setup.
Bible Search also created a new product-learning loop.
Between August 26 and September 21, users performed 24 Bible searches, and the visible searches returned passage text. That gave me early signal into what users were looking for directly, instead of only relying on mood-based discovery.
This helped me see search not only as a feature, but as a way to understand content demand. If users search for verses that do not yet have related lessons, that becomes a signal for future lesson planning.
Waymark also introduced its first localization: Bahasa Indonesia.
This mattered because the problem Waymark is solving is not limited to English-speaking users. It also made sense personally: I’m Indonesian, so Bahasa Indonesia was the most natural first step for expanding Waymark beyond English.
Many Indonesian users also want a guided way to understand Scripture and connect it to everyday life, but the experience needs to feel natural in their language, not simply translated.
Adding localization became more than a copy update. It touched onboarding, interface text, push notification scheduling, Bible search behavior, and the way content needed to feel in a different language.
The work also surfaced technical constraints around Bible access. For Indonesian search, I had to work with a different provider setup while continuing to explore the ideal Bible API and licensing path.
Localization was not just language support. It became a product system: Scripture access, lesson content, onboarding, notifications, and interface copy all had to work together with the same level of clarity and trust as the original experience.
Another part of Waymark’s growth was improving how the product was presented before someone even downloaded it.
This started during a Build in Public challenge, where I shared Waymark’s App Store page and received feedback from other builders. The feedback helped me see that the screenshots were explaining the app, but not clearly enough showing why someone would need it in a real-life moment.
The old screenshots were more feature-led. They explained what Waymark offered: daily lessons, guided reflection, journaling, and a calmer way to read Scripture. But they did not make the user’s moment of need clear enough.
That pushed me to rework the App Store positioning around real-life situations: feeling anxious about the future, wanting to understand a verse more deeply, needing guidance, or looking for a more practical way to connect Scripture with everyday life.
The new screenshots became more problem-led. Instead of only saying “Understand the Bible daily,” the positioning moved closer to moments like “When you feel anxious about the future” or “When you want to understand a verse more deeply.”
That made the screenshots less about listing features and more about helping the right user recognize themselves in the product.
At the time, Waymark’s App Store acquisition was still inconsistent.
The July 16 snapshot showed low discovery momentum, with impressions, product page views, first-time downloads, and redownloads all trending down.
As I slowly picked up pace on Threads and improved how Waymark was positioned, the top-of-funnel signals became stronger.
By September 16, App Store Connect showed impressions up by 640%, product page views up by 90%, and first-time downloads up by 214%.
I did not treat this as a perfect conversion story. The data showed more visibility and more product page activity, but conversion still needed work. That was useful because it helped me separate two different questions:
Are more people seeing Waymark?
And once they see it, does the App Store page convince the right users to download?
This changed how I thought about ASO. It was not only about keywords or visibility. It was also about conversion: helping the right users quickly recognize that Waymark was built for their situation.
The bigger learning was that product positioning does not only happen inside the product. It also happens at the first touchpoint, before the user decides to download.
After the first launch, I also started thinking more about how Waymark fits into someone’s daily rhythm.
That led to widgets, push notifications, offline support, dark mode, and small shortcuts that make the app easier to return to.
Widgets were designed as shortcuts. One update to the Faith Journey widget added faster access to Bible passage search and journal creation, so users do not always need to open the app and navigate manually.
Push notifications were added as a gentle return path, not to demand attention, but to remind users that Waymark is there when they need it.
Offline support was more about reliability. If the database is slow or unavailable, users should still be able to perform certain actions without the app becoming useless.
Dark mode was a technical learning moment. I had not originally built the codebase with dark mode in mind, so adding it required refactoring parts of the implementation to support both current and future screens more cleanly.
These updates taught me that product quality lives beyond the main feature. It also shows up in the small moments around it: returning, saving, searching, writing, and continuing.
The new lesson experience went live in version 1.1.6 on August 16.
Before the update, I already knew the lesson flow needed work. Users were starting lessons, but the experience still felt too long and article-like. The redesign was my response to that UX problem: breaking the lesson into a page-by-page flow so it felt lighter, more focused, and easier to finish.
To understand whether the redesign was moving in the right direction, I looked at lesson completion rate in PostHog: the percentage of users who completed a lesson after starting one.
Before the redesign, from July 7 to August 15, the lesson completion rate was 38.46%. After the redesign went live, from August 16 to September 21, it increased to 48.94%.
The sample size was still early, so I did not treat this as a final verdict. But it was a useful directional signal. The redesigned lesson flow appeared to support better completion, and more importantly, it gave me a clearer way to keep measuring whether the core experience was improving.
This changed how I approached iteration. Instead of asking, “Does the lesson feel better?” in a vague way, I could ask more specific product questions:
How many users who start a lesson complete it?
Where are users still dropping off?
Does the page-by-page flow make the lesson feel easier to finish?
Are reflection, prayer, and journaling becoming natural next steps after the lesson?
The redesign was not the end of the lesson experience. It gave me a clearer measurement loop for the core journey: start, completion, reflection, prayer, and journaling.
For a period of time, I paused deeper product work and focused on TikTok and Instagram.
My assumption was simple: faith-based content performs well there, so Waymark could grow awareness through those channels.
But when I looked at the funnel from May 5 to July 22, the signal was mixed. People were seeing the content, but that attention was not turning into meaningful activation inside the product. In that period, users were entering the funnel, but the tracked flow did not reach lesson completion.
That helped me separate attention from activation. TikTok and Instagram could create views, but views alone did not mean people were becoming engaged Waymark users.
In the next phase, I returned to product iteration and slowly picked up pace again on Threads. This was also when Waymark had more product improvements in place, including registration/onboarding refinements, the redesigned lesson experience, and clearer product positioning.
So I do not see the later funnel improvement as a simple “Threads performed better” story. It was more layered than that. The product had improved, the positioning had become clearer, and the channel where I was sharing Waymark gave people more context around what I was building and why.
Threads worked differently because it created conversation, not just reach. Through build-in-public posts, people could understand the problem I was solving, the decisions behind each feature, and the way Waymark was evolving.
TikTok and Instagram created attention. Threads created more relevant context.
That became the bigger lesson: growth was not only about posting more. It was about finding the channel where the product story, audience, and user intent were better aligned.
What I Would Do Differently
I would not completely ignore TikTok or Instagram, but I would treat them differently.
They may still be useful for brand presence, updates, and future content experiments. But for now, I am focusing more on channels where I can communicate the product thinking behind Waymark and engage with people who are closer to the problem.
The bigger learning is that not all awareness is equal.
A view is not the same as intent. A download is not the same as activation. A user who understands the problem may be more valuable than a larger audience that never connects the content back to the product.
Waymark has taught me that building a product after launch is less about adding more features and more about understanding why each improvement matters.
The interface upgrade taught me to connect visual quality with usability.
The lesson redesign taught me to treat drop-off as a design problem.
The journal improvements taught me to design around real-life context, not only ideal app usage.
Bible Search taught me that features can also become learning systems.
The marketing experiment taught me that growth is not only about reach. It is about reaching the right people in the right context.
Waymark is still growing, but this phase changed how I build.
I no longer see launch as the finish line. I see it as the point where the real product conversation begins.