The least interesting work — picking a subdomain, wiring up hosting — is what makes the interesting work possible. The same holds for focus itself.
Setup work has a bad reputation
Nobody enjoys picking a domain. It is the task that sits on a list for a week because it produces nothing to look at.
And yet it quietly decides how everything after it feels. A site living at a tidy, memorable address is easier to share and easier to remember. A site living at a long path on someone else's domain works, and always feels borrowed.
Two ways to put an app online
The first is a path on an existing site — yourdomain.com/appname. Everything stays under one roof, which is genuinely nice for search engines, but it asks you to configure a reverse proxy and keep two hosting setups agreeing with each other. Powerful, and easy to break later.
The second is a subdomain — appname.yourdomain.com. Finished in minutes, independent, and it never puts the main site at risk. The cost is that it is technically a separate name, which only matters if you are already ranking well enough to care.
Choose the option you can finish
When I put FocusBottle online, the decision took ten minutes: a subdomain, pointed at hosting, done. Not because the other route was worse, but because it would still have been half-configured a month later.
That is the rule worth keeping. Between two technically valid options, take the one you will actually complete this week. A finished unglamorous thing beats an elegant unfinished one, every time.
Where that principle ends up
The same logic returns once the app is real. Every extra minute of setup you ask of a new user is a minute they spend deciding not to bother.
So the standard inside FocusBottle is blunt: open it, start a session. No account, no onboarding wizard. Pick 25, 50 or 90 minutes and light particles begin moving in a bottle, responding to your attention as you work.
Do the annoying part once, before anyone is watching. Then hand people the shortest possible path to the thing that helps them.