Summer 2024 was when I realized I was getting tired of my own screenshots. Every few days, I’d open five different apps just to check if anything had changed — a handful of new followers here, a dip there, maybe a spike I couldn’t trace. I wasn’t obsessed with growth, but I wanted to stay consistent. And I wasn’t alone. My friends — especially the ones building in public — were doing the same thing. Quietly tracking. Comparing. Forgetting. Rechecking. Repeat.

So I designed SF Battles — a simple platform to track and aggregate your follower counts across platforms, automatically. Think of it as a social scoreboard you don’t have to maintain.

As a freelance designer, I built it with one core idea in mind: progress feels better when it’s visible. SF Battles let you create a customizable profile, connect all your platforms, and check your numbers at a glance — even offline. No dashboards screaming at you, no bloat. Just clean, personal, consistent feedback.

But the real fun started when I invited a few founder friends to try it. People started screenshotting their stats, making it a game. “Just passed you on Twitter,” one text said. Friendly competition became part of the product — not because I designed it in, but because the people using it brought that energy. I leaned into it. SF Battles became less about growth hacking and more about showing up — and having people around you doing the same.

This wasn’t a growth tool. It was a mirror. Quiet accountability. Shared momentum. One number at a time.