Why I built Namaz / Salah app.

Hey there—

I’m Fatih, founder of this application. I’ve been having trouble practicing my namazs on a daily basis most of my life — for more than 20 years.

You may ask me why I built this, and why it is a paid application. You may be curious where the idea came from:

I wish I could credit any deep insight or a success story I have created in myself or people around me. But I can’t. Truth is, I built NamazEven out of desperate necessity for myself. I need this bad. I can't seem to put myself on a schedule to practice my namazs consistently. Although I see myself intact in my beliefs, I am an embarrassment myself when it comes to practicing.

Way back when, I was in middle school/high school, I had practiced namaz about 10% of the time. Subconciously, I had a belief that I had time, I was going to pray multiple namazs in the coming years, and break even easily. As I grew, I kept slacking more and more — except one winter and summer term in university that I practiced all 5 salahs with almost 90% on time rate. I was staying alone in the dormitory when I began, any my girl friend back then was also a practicer. Then courses, exams and other life stuff started to became an excuse and I went back to the previous levels of slacking. I was still thinking I could go back to 5x/day routine easily. I was fooling myself. Sounds familiar?

It wasn’t that I lacked the time or the right people around me — looking back now; I think I had both. However, I really hated being told to practice namaz. I just don't feel sincere when I am told to do it and I comply. I just didn’t have the right mindset, and once that mindset is gone, it is really hard to bring it back. This is one of the most challenging habits in life yet it is the single most important one. I still am disorganized, have no discipline, and namazs are slipping every day in my life.

I am indeed suffering, and, as is often the case in situations like this, I am not moving to a better path in a fresh day. Each year, it becomes exponentially harder to break even as my body grow older, put on weight, and as building family means way less time for myself. It is especially painful and uncomfortable to realize that I can't even break even anymore.

I needed a better way to manage my namazs, track them daily and include them in my qada debt autonomously as I miss them, and make progress towards that break even point(I will call it a NamazEven point from now on). On and off practicing, 1 week on, 2-3 weeks off, sometimes pray here, there, and anywhere just wasn’t cutting it. Practicing like that work for couple days, and then fall apart fast — especially, as you grow old and add more responsibilities to the slacker life.

I looked around and tried a few things, one thing that worked particularly was this: I asked, one of my friends, Tarık, to write me on WhatsApp for an entire month, everytime he was going to Mosque. I was not going to reply him whether I prayed or not, I was not going to respond. The deal was only one-way communication. Although, it was very boring on his side, it worked for me. I prayed during that time +80% on time! He was not able to complete the whole 30 day but he did great for about 20 days. So I decided to build my own namaz management system from scratch.

I focused on building a simple, straightforward website that could track daily and qada namazs and send namaz reminders on WhatsApp. (WhatsApp notifications are not available yet, I will deliver it in Q1-2024,(Cloud API just got available as of June, so will deliver in Q3-2024) I wanted to publish this as it is to see if there is any interest in the market)

I will start using this application at the same time with you. Maybe this can be a product for others, and not just for me? If it works for me, surely it might work for you. And things that work, deserves to be paid for.

Based on your feedback, I will make continuous improvements over the weeks, with much more to come.(Implementing WhatsApp integration and namaz plans & challenges to reach NamazEven point as soon as possible)

It’s been an incredible ride so far, and I have so many people to thank. I hope that, when more people fix their salah schedule I can consider this as my most useful work in my life. What a blessing it would be.

Thanks for reading, and for giving NamazEven a try. You can always contact me directly if you have any questions at [email protected] . I look forward to hearing from you.