New apps here tend to get introduced the same way: "it's basically the Jamaican [something]." A local stand-in for a bigger, more familiar product. It's meant as a compliment, and it's understandable shorthand — but it's a strange place to build from.
If you start by asking "what would the imported version of this look like," you've already inherited a long list of assumptions you never actually chose. What the product includes, what it leaves out, what "normal" looks like inside it — all of that got decided somewhere else, for a different everyday life, before you even opened your own.
What building outward instead looks like
We wrote about this before with YardFit's ingredients specifically — the rule that everything in a recipe has to be something you can actually buy, local or not. That's one visible piece of a bigger habit: we try not to ask "what does the equivalent app do," we ask "what does someone here actually need, day to day." Sometimes those answers overlap with what exists elsewhere. Sometimes they don't at all. The workouts YardFit builds are shaped around the equipment people actually have access to — which for a lot of people is none, and a plan that assumes a gym membership isn't useful, it's just familiar.
That's the real difference. Not being different for its own sake, and not being local as a personality trait — just refusing to treat "what's already out there" as the baseline you're allowed to deviate from.
Why this matters beyond one app
There's a lot of everyday software that genuinely doesn't exist yet for how things actually work here — not because the problems are small, but because most software gets built somewhere else, for somewhere else, and arrives here already finished. Starting from what's actually in front of you, instead of adapting something that already answered all its own questions elsewhere, is slower. It's also the only way we know to end up with something that actually fits.
That's the whole premise of this studio, not just one app's design decision. We'll take the slower path if it means building something real, rather than something familiar.