WHIITEROOM JOURNEY
From a simple black screen experiment called Nocastinator to a complete whitelist productivity workspace.
Every product starts with a problem.
Mine wasn't a lack of motivation. It was opening YouTube for a tutorial... and somehow ending up watching videos that had nothing to do with what I originally came for.
I tried productivity apps and website blockers. They worked—just not in the way I needed.
I didn't want another app that asked me what to block. I wanted one that asked what I actually needed—and got everything else out of the way.
That simple idea eventually became Whiiteroom.
Over the next few posts, I'll be sharing how that blurry idea turned into a product, the mistakes I made, the decisions behind its design, and what I'm building next.
Whiiteroom Journey Slide Deck
Slide 1 of 5
This was the very first version of Whiiteroom.
Back then, it wasn't even called Whiiteroom. It was called Nocastinator—a mix of No and Procrastinator.
I already knew what I wanted to build: a computer where only what I needed for my work was available, while everything else stayed out of the way. What I didn't know was how to build something like that.
• I didn't know if my coding skills were enough.
• I didn't know how to allow only certain apps and websites while blocking everything else.
• I didn't even know if it was technically possible.
So instead of trying to build the entire product, I asked myself one simple question:
"What's the smallest thing I can make that moves me one step closer?"
That became my first experiment:
- A fullscreen window.
- A timer.
- And one rule: Until the timer ends, if you tried to switch apps with Alt+Tab, Task View, or anything else, you were brought straight back to the session screen.
Just a black screen with a timer that refused to let you leave.
Looking at it today, it almost feels unreal. That tiny experiment eventually became what Whiiteroom is today.
Sometimes the hardest part isn't building the product. It's believing you can build it at all.
Connect with Founder Archit Singh
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