My Mac died in the middle of work. Not once, either. The battery percentage sat in my menu bar the whole time, right where I could see it, and I ignored it anyway. A number is easy to ignore. It does not ask for anything. It just sits there, getting smaller, until the screen goes black.
That was the moment Pettery started. Not as a business idea, and not as a battery utility. As a fix for a very specific personal failure: I cannot be trusted to notice a percentage.
A number nobody reads
The menu bar already shows the battery. macOS already warns you at 20% and 10%. None of it worked for me, because a warning you have seen a hundred times stops being a warning. You dismiss it, you keep working, and you tell yourself you will plug in soon. Soon turns out to be too late.
I did not need more information. I needed something I would actually look at. Something with a face.
Why a pet for a battery?
So Pettery turns your battery into a pet with six moods. On a good charge it is playful and content. As the battery drains it gets sleepy, then grumpy, then dramatic. It can also warn you at 20, 10 and 5 percent, in case the face alone was not enough.
It worked on me, which is how a joke I made for myself turned into a product. I built it with Swift and SwiftUI, and it lives in the menu bar, quietly, doing exactly one job.
Three decisions I made on purpose
Pay once, no subscription. I am tired of renting small utilities, and I suspect a lot of Mac users are too. Pettery is free to start, with three pets included. Extra pets come in packs at $2.99 one time, singles at $1.49, or $9.74 for everything (launch pricing until the end of the year). One license covers 2 Macs.
One job, done quietly. It lives in the menu bar, reacts to your battery, and does nothing else. No feed, no streaks, no growth hacks inside the app.
No data games. The app asks for notifications permission only. No account, no analytics, and nothing about your battery ever leaves your Mac.
The launch went fine. Then the real work started.
Pettery went live at getpettery.app on November 3, and launched on Product Hunt on November 5. The site worked, the download worked, and the first sale came a few days later. On paper, a good launch week.
But a launch is a day on the calendar, and distribution is not. Nobody owes your app a first impression, not Google, not a stranger on launch day. Building the thing was only half the job, and for a tiny indie app it might have been the easier half.
So this week I am doing the unglamorous part. Yesterday I rewrote the titles on my two most commercial pages, /packs and /compare, around the searches I actually want to be found for. This week I am also following up with the five Mac publications I pitched on launch day. And I am writing posts like this one, in places where the people who might care actually hang out.
It is slow work, and most of it will not show up anywhere. That is fine. Distribution is a second product, and you ship it every week after the first one.
If you try it
Pettery is free to start at getpettery.app and needs macOS 14 or later. If you try it, I would love to hear what you think, especially if the little face makes you plug in sooner than the percentage ever did.
And if you have shipped a small Mac app yourself: which channel brought you your first strangers? I am collecting answers for round two.
Top comments (3)
Pettery is a great name. Pet plus battery, and your line Pet for your battery tells me the whole idea in one second. That is the test I use, say it out loud and see if a stranger gets it. The launch point is right too. A launch is a day, distribution is the weekly work after it. Rewriting those two pages around the searches you actually want is exactly the kind of quiet work that pays off.
Thank you! That is exactly how the name happened, I said it out loud and it just clicked. And you are right about the launch, one day of noise, then the quiet weekly work. Rewriting those two pages felt like the first honest distribution work I did.
"A launch is a day on the calendar, and distribution is not" is painfully accurate. My launch day felt like crossing a finish line, and then the next morning was the quietest one yet, which felt wrong in a way I was not prepared for. Nobody owes your app a first impression is the line I keep coming back to. What has actually moved things for me since is tiny and slow: replying properly to the few people who did look, and showing up in threads where people describe the exact problem, instead of announcing anything. The pet idea makes sense to me for the same reason, by the way. A face gets looked at, a number gets dismissed. I ignore percentages in every app I use. Has the second week told you anything about where a first impression for something like this actually comes from?