I set out to build a bump tracker. A few weeks into it, I realized the app didn't actually track a single thing — and that ended up being one of the best things that happened during the project.
For the first few weeks, the working name in my notes was literally "bump tracker." That's what I thought I was building: something in the same general category as pregnancy apps that tell you your baby is the size of a mango this week, let you log symptoms, keep track of appointments, and generally help you keep tabs on your pregnancy.
But every time I sat down to build the actual "tracking" part, I kept running into the same problem: I didn't really have anything I wanted to track.
There was no symptom log. No kick counter. No appointment calendar. The only things I had actually built were a daily reminder to take a photo and a way to line up today's bump photo with yesterday's.
That was basically the whole app.
I wasn't tracking a pregnancy. I was helping someone take a photo in roughly the same place every day, so that after a few months those photos could be turned into one smooth video.
That's not really a tracker.
It's a timelapse.
The name that was hiding in plain sight
Once I thought about it that way, the name was pretty obvious: bump + timelapse = BumpLapse.
I remember being slightly annoyed that I hadn't thought of it earlier. I'd spent weeks calling the project "bump tracker" while the actual thing I was building was sitting right in front of me.
Of course, coming up with the name was the easy part. The next question was whether somebody had already taken it.
So, as you do when you have a new idea at 11pm, I typed bumplapse.com into the address bar. I was expecting either a parked domain or, worse, an actual competing app.
Nothing.
It was available.
I checked Instagram. Available. TikTok. Also available.
For a name that felt so obvious once I'd come up with it, I genuinely couldn't believe nobody had grabbed it already. I bought the domain that night before I could overthink it.
Once I stopped calling it a tracker, the product changed
The rename ended up being more than just changing the name.
When I thought I was building a tracker, I kept thinking about what else the app should track. More fields, more data, more things for someone to log.
But once I thought of it as a timelapse app, the product became much simpler. There were really only two things that mattered: remind someone to take the photo, and make it easy to line that photo up with the previous one.
Those were already the two things I'd built. I just hadn't realized they were the actual product.
It also made me think about how many other things work the same way.
A pregnancy bump is probably the most obvious example, because it changes slowly enough that you don't really notice it from one day to the next, but dramatically enough that seeing the whole progression is pretty amazing.
But it could be getting back in shape, recovering from an injury, renovating a kitchen, growing your hair out, or any number of other things.
You don't necessarily need to "track" those things. Sometimes you just need a reminder to take the photo and a way to keep the photos consistent.
BumpLapse still focuses on pregnancy, because that's where the idea came from and that's what the app is built around today. But underneath, it's really a timelapse app for things that change slowly. Pregnancy just happens to be the first one.
What I kept, and what I didn't build
I kept the due date and pregnancy week information because, for a pregnancy app, that context is genuinely useful. It also gives you a nice way to understand where each photo sits in the timeline.
What I dropped — or, more accurately, what I never ended up building — was most of the stuff that would have turned it into a traditional pregnancy tracker.
No symptom logs. No forums. No kick counter. No baby registry upsells.
Just the photo, the reminder, the alignment, and eventually the video.
Looking back, I'm pretty happy that I never built the app I originally thought I was building.
The domain is BumpLapse.com. The Instagram handle is @bumplapse. The TikTok handle is @bumplapse.
And the more I use it, the more I think the name fits.
It's a simple name for a simple idea: take a photo every day, line it up with the last one, and eventually see something that you couldn't really see happening day by day. A bump tracker that doesn't actually track anything.
Start your own timelapse
Download BumpLapse free and take your first aligned photo today — bump or otherwise.