Four claims our own website invented about our own app
We wrote the marketing copy from our backlog instead of from the code. Everything in it was plausible. Four things in it were false, and they had been on the site for months.
The first version of this website's copy was written from our product backlog and from the page it was replacing. That sounds reasonable. It is the standard way marketing copy gets written, and it is how a product ends up describing a different product.
Then we walked every factual claim in it against the Flutter app, line by line. Four did not survive.
1. There is no circadian engine
The homepage sold a Circadian Engine: you give it your wake time, it splits your day into three phases, and it sorts your tasks into the window that suits their cognitive weight.
None of that exists. It had existed in one interactive demo component on the website, and the copy had been written from the demo.
What the app actually has is a peak hour, seeded from a single onboarding question and then corrected against your real focus sessions — plus a scheduler that refuses to fire when that hour is unknown. The comment in the source says never invent a time.
The true claim turned out to be the better one. "We measured when you focus" is a stronger sentence than "we modelled your circadian rhythm", and it has the advantage of being checkable.
2. There is no 10/70/10 warm-up split
The copy described focus blocks as ten percent warm-up, seventy percent deep work, ten percent wind-down.
The app has typed blocks — Deep Focus, Rest, Admin — and five selectable lengths: 25, 30, 45, 60, 90, with 45 as the default. There is no internal split of any block into phases.
One draft had also mocked up a 25-minute timer, which is a length we do ship, so the screenshot would have been almost real. That is worse than obviously fake, not better.
3. The five sub-scores were named wrong
The site listed sub-scores that were not the sub-scores. The real five are focus, consistency, energy, goal alignment and life balance, and the composite is the unweighted mean of the non-Building ones — going unavailable below two rather than low.
Getting the names wrong is a small error. Describing a composite that always produces a number, when the real one frequently refuses to, is not: the refusal is the product.
4. There is no four-dimension model
The design opened on your four dimensions — mind, spirit, body, world as though the app modelled them.
It does not. The life areas are eight: health, career, study, side project, money, relationships, spirituality, other. The four petals are a reading of the brand mark, which genuinely has four petals, and that is now what the site says they are — with the app's real eight areas named underneath.
What we changed about the process
The rule is now written at the top of the repository's own instructions: the Android app is the source of truth for every product claim, and it is read before any sentence describing the product is written or edited.
That has since caught four more claims in a later design, and one case of the reverse — a privacy policy that was correct when written and became wrong three weeks later because the app moved underneath it. That one is worth its own post.