Shipped with Helm: Gentler Streak & The Outsiders

Next up is Katarina Lotrič, co-founder and CEO of Gentler Stories, the women-led indie studio behind Gentler Streak, an inclusive fitness tracker for people who want balance, health, and feeling good in their bodies, and The Outsiders, an athlete tracker for the training-obsessed who geek out over progress, metrics, and structured workouts.

---

Can you tell us about your apps and the team behind them?

We’re Gentler Stories, a small, women-led indie studio of nine based in Slovenia. We build digital tools we ourselves are missing on the market, and we live what we preach.

Gentler Streak is for people who live an active lifestyle. I count myself among them, where movement is part of our daily routine. We’re likely not chasing personal bests or performance zones; we are after balance, health, and feeling good in our bodies. Activity is a companion to life, not the main focus: it helps improve the mood today, and is an investment in the health of tomorrow. Inclusivity and accessibility are central to how we built it, as we wanted to include everyone in the active crowd.

The Outsiders, on the other hand, is for the training-obsessed. These are people who geek out over progress, metrics, structured workouts, and performance. They don’t just exercise, they train. Their sport isn’t just part of life, it’s part of who they are. But with all that, they still put their body first, and it’s how they want to approach their training.

Two apps, as we’re speaking to two different mindsets, and we live both of them daily at the office. Our co-founder Andrej Mihelič is the team’s resident “outsider”: for him, Gentler Streak was always just one part of a bigger training routine. He found a like-minded ally in Matija Kregar, lead developer on the project, and together they led the charge on The Outsiders, with the rest of us chipping in along the way.

As a team, we work mostly on-site, together, because we believe that’s how you can really give your all to the process. We practice full on-device privacy: no accounts, no data sharing, and we treat the people using our apps the way we’d want to be treated. (Not so) humble brag: Gentler Streak won an Apple Design Award for Social Impact and was named App Store App of the Year for Apple Watch. The Outsiders was a 2026 Apple Design Award Finalist for Interaction. Being indie, recognition like this means the world on so many levels!

What’s your workstation setup, and what’s in your dock?

I’m afraid it’s not too exciting. :D

As devices go, I have Apple Watch Ultra 2 and iPhone Air, both on silent mode with zero notifications apart from Apple Watch giving me taptic feedback for iMessage and calls. I use a 5-year-old MacBook Air plugged into an LG display, with a Logitech MX Vertical mouse and Ergo K860 keyboard, which are both lifesavers for me.

I mostly work on some form of copywriting: product-related, business, marketing, or press. For that I use Slack, email, Google Docs, Claude, Notes, and more. Then I use Zeplin to look at design sketches, Trello to stay on top of our progress, Helm to push updates, and 1Password for my constant battle with… passwords. In my dock, there are also apps I never use, or no longer use. I guess that tells you a lot about my approach to optimizing. :D

How do you plan your updates?

Being a small team working across two products, we have to be realistic and smart about prioritizing.

We have a general vision for both apps, so most features come naturally out of that. Beyond that, we rely on feedback from the community and on watching what’s happening in the market. If something new fits our vision, values, and integrity, we add it to our roadmap and build our own take on it. Then there’s the essential iOS update each year, where we follow the same principle. We also tend to plan certain features around key moments in the year for active life.

But even with all that, we know unplanned situations will happen too: like someone on the team getting sick, becoming a parent, or simply the need to optimize app performance, an unexpected bug… These are things that shift the timeline in ways we don’t have that much control over. So yes, we always have some sort of roadmap, but in hindsight, it’s constantly reshaped by real life. And honestly, I think that’s normal and reasonable.

What does your launch checklist look like?

Oh, it’s long now! :D I just checked and it consists of 36 ticks — not all of them are needed for each update, as the list covers everything from in-app features, beta testing, and App Store listings, to pricing, feature testing, and even marketing and press actions tied to the release. We tag different folks on different tasks, so in theory you always know where we’re at with a certain task. I say “in theory” because, in real life, it does happen that you forget to mark it… :))

How do you decide what’s “ready to ship” and what needs to wait?

First, we (everyone on the team, we have no dedicated quality assurance person) test ourselves, then we test with our beta testers, and then, if all looks good, we ship. If we or the people in beta find inconsistencies, scenarios we didn’t cover, or bugs, we pull the plug and fix it. We’re aware that Gentler Stories is not that important, that we make apps, not save lives or put out literal fires, so we don’t create unnecessary drama if we miss a launch date. It’s all about perspective: when we work, we do our best, and we do deliver roughly on time. If we are a day or two or seven late, no-one will suffer. So if I have to choose between hitting an exact launch day versus office wellbeing, I will always choose office wellbeing.

If you could go back to your first big release, what advice would you give yourself?

Don’t stress, no one will see it anyway. :D

What’s your stack or toolset for managing releases?

Before we had two apps, a larger team (there are 9 of us now), and more areas to cover than just product, our default was simple: talking things through and writing them down. That meant personal to-do lists, with an official sync once a week and unofficial ones daily, whenever we were sticking our heads together.

We tried project management tools before, Trello, then Notion, but with just one app and a small team, they were just another thing to manage, mostly serving themselves rather than us, so we quit.

But having two apps running in parallel, we started noticing things getting lost in the process. That’s when we gave Trello another try, and this time it (sort of) sticks: we use it only for product. I would say that our capability and responsibility to communicate clearly and regularly is still our primary way of staying on top of things.

What’s your favourite Helm feature?

Compared to App Store Connect it’s faster and makes much more sense UI/UX-wise. What our designer absolutely loves is the ease of uploading screenshots: it actually knows their sequence and puts each screenshot in the right place, which should not be a flex, but turns out it is! :) So, thank you for it.

Anything or anyone you want to promote or plug?

Yes! I would like to mention Filip Luchianenco and Can I Trust That. His goal is to make apps safer for everyone, especially for children, and his approach is transparency rather than confrontation. I love his mission and think his service deserves greater visibility! Anything we, as developers and representatives of the ecosystem, can do to help people better understand what type of apps they’re letting into their lives by downloading them, and to what they’re (silently) consenting when doing so, is much needed.

---

That’s a wrap on our second Shipped with Helm interview. Thanks to Katarina Lotrič and the Gentler Stories team for sharing how they plan, test, and ship updates for Gentler Streak and The Outsiders without losing sight of what matters. More conversations with the developers behind the apps you know and love are on the way.