Maker's Corner: Sh*t that sells: From toilet tracker to business breakthrough

Hi everyone! Please welcome this week's Maker's Corner feature, @catt_marroll , Founder of @https://www.producthunt.com/products/purposeful-poop

Feel free to chime in below in the comments with questions on his product or journey or anything else that comes to mind!

If you're interested in being featured in our Maker's Corner, please let us know here on this forum thread.

What inspired you to build your product? What problem were you trying to solve when you built it? Has that evolved?

I originally bought the domain in 2023 for this exact idea, but I planned to make it a mobile app. It would be a button you press when using the bathroom, then keep track of the time and give you a report at the end of the year. I wanted to launch something on PH, and it seemed tractable.

It resurfaced in 2025 when Aaron posted a thread about useless domains you had. In the interim I had started working on a personal finance tool, and trying hard to get some beta users. I realized I could try to make that app (as simple as possible), and use it with a CTA to drive traffic to my personal finance project.

What’s a feature or detail you obsessed over that most users will never notice—but you're really proud of?

Almost all of the time on the app was actually spent just trying to update the main app I wanted to drive traffic too -- my financé. I ended up thinking that OG images would be important for shareability, so I set up a server to be able to render a nice OG image when you share your results.

Honestly, I wouldn't say I'm proud of any technical feature of the app, it all was thrown together very quickly. I am pretty adamant about my hate for marketing and ads, but I hoping that this was tasteful enough to pass my own personal lever of "annoyingness".

TL;DR if i obsessed over anything it was bigger picture of how to market in general.

What’s something that didn’t make it into your product for this launch, but you'd like to build?

I have a few more ideas for tools that have a similar arc: Either funny or moderately useful, with some CTA to the finance tool I am hoping to gain traction with. It would be cool if this tool continued to gain traction post launch. If so maybe I'll make some T-shirts or something available for purchase.

Is this your first product? If not, what else have you built, or are currently working on?

It's my second launch on PH. the first was tab-slayer -- a chrome extension that kills your tabs at some interval (unless they are "spared"). It's both helpful and super annoying when you're using a tab and it gets slain.

My main side project continues to be My Financé. I would love for that to grow into a small sustainable project and have been putting most of my free time into that. I'm trying to take the "modern maker approach" where I talk about it in public a lot, ship fast, etc. It's hard when I know things in the site are buggy or suboptimal, but I think it's been good to be willing to talk about it and get eyes on it.

What’s your secret weapon or go-to when you get stuck while building?

I really like working early in the morning before my partner wakes up. I have been on a huge bonobo kick for the past year, I probably have listened to both this and this >100 times in the past year.

When did you decide to launch on Product Hunt, and how did you prep for it? Do you have any advice for someone thinking about launching?

I spend a lot of time on PH and am more or less always scheming to launch something. Most things wind up in the graveyard before I actually launch. For this specific app the whole loop was ~5 days from start building to launch.

In terms of advice, I really have no idea. I think a lot of projects are super interesting when you are deep in the domain, but many of the taglines I read I just don't really know if I care or should care. i.e. I would be really impressive if I knew what the builder knew and cared about the space, but that isn't always the case for me, personally.

Community building is hard and takes time, so preemptively trying to build up an identity by being active is probably the best thing you can do.

Also PH isn't necessarily the 'best' venue for every app. If you are building a tool for a really small set of nuclear physicists, having a low ranking PH launch probably doesn't tell you too much.

If the launch of my finance tool is half as good as this launch, I would be both really psyched and honestly surprised. getting people to click on something funny feels way easier than something "real".

What's the most surprising or unexpected learning and/or feedback you've received?

Honestly, the whole thing went about as I expected. Also this project has the "No hugs, no learning" mantra to some extent. If there was a killer feature that made it 10x as shareable I would build it! but I didn't receive (or expect) that.

Share a few Products and/or Makers that inspire you and why

I enjoy a good piece of boring software. @Discharge - Battery Warning is something that I constantly tell people about and love.

I honestly am pretty "light" on tools in my normally workflow.

But anyone that has built and grown a piece of software and converted people to paying users has a ton of my respect. It's really not trivial (at least for me!), so getting a stripe payment represents a really impressive demonstration of skill and tenacity.