Week one. We are doing this backwards on purpose

Why we are building this

Everyone we know is drowning in things they are supposed to do to feel better. Eight glasses of water. Ten thousand steps. Cold plunge, gratitude journal, no phone in the bedroom, meditate, stretch, get outside, go to bed earlier. All of it probably true. All of it, together, another job on top of the one you have.

So people do what anyone would do. They download something. They use it for nine days. They stop, and now they have a thing they feel bad about on top of everything else.

Here is what we think is actually going on. Your day is much simpler than the internet says it is. You wake up, you do something, you eat, you get a break if you are lucky, maybe one more block, and it is over. There is not that much time in it. There are not that many things.

And in that small, unglamorous day, some very small thing usually turns out to be doing most of the work. Ten minutes outside before the calls. Going to bed before eleven. One song, loud, in the kitchen. Not all of them. One or two, and they are different for everyone, and nobody can tell you which ones are yours.

That is the whole company. Not another list of what helps. A way to find out which two things actually work for you, out of your own days, and then to leave you alone about it.

So the first thing we are building is not the app

We could ship something next month. It would be fast, it would look decent, and it would be built on what we assume about a person's Tuesday.

We have decided that is the wrong order. The thing we are least sure about is not the code, it is whether we understand the problem well enough to be worth anyone's time. So the first sprint is fifty emails, not fifty commits.

We went and found people whose weeks leave them almost no minutes they control. Teachers. Nurses. A few who are both, somehow. Solicitors, project managers, people in customer support. We ordered the list by how little of the day belongs to them, worst first, because those are the people this either works for or does not.

What this week actually looks like

Monday and Tuesday: fifty emails, ten at a time, ninety minutes apart. Not because we enjoy the pacing but because the address is brand new and fifty messages leaving at once from a domain with no history is the exact shape spam filters are built to catch. Boring, unglamorous, the difference between reaching people and reaching a folder.

Every email points at fourteen questions on our site. Three minutes, mostly buttons, one box that actually matters: in your own words, what does an ordinary weekday feel like at the moment. That box is the entire reason the form exists. Everything else sorts people. That one tells us who they are.

Then we wait. Which is the part nobody warns you about.

We have no idea what the reply rate will be. Cold outreach to strangers who owe us nothing, asking for a full hour, offering no money and no product, from a company they have never heard of. Our honest guess is somewhere between three and eight per cent, and we have been wrong about worse.

If it is three per cent we send another hundred and ninety two and rethink the message. If it is eight we have twenty conversations booked in a fortnight and a very full calendar. Either way we will tell you here, with the real number, including if the real number is embarrassing.

The bit we are nervous about

Interviews are easy to run and hard to run well. People are kind. They will tell you your idea is good, because you are on a video call and you built it and they do not want to be unkind to a stranger who seems earnest.

So we are not going to describe the product. Not in the first twenty minutes, maybe not at all. We are going to ask about last Tuesday. What time they got up, what the first hour was like, when the day turned, whether it turned. What they have already tried and quit, and what was happening in their life the week they quit it.

If we walk out of twenty of those with our current plan intact, we will have learned nothing and should be suspicious. We are half expecting to throw something away.

What is already live

The site went from nine sections to one. The price came off, because there is nothing to buy. The app screenshots came off, because they showed an interface we are replacing. The sign up came off, because there is nothing behind it. What is left says we are building it, which has the advantage of being true.

The whole thing sits on a form and an address box, and that is deliberate. We would rather have fifty people who told us something real than five thousand who bounced off a landing page.

Next week

Reply rate. First interview, if we get one. And what the first person we talk to makes us change.

This is entry one and it will be uneven, because the work is. What you will get here is what changed, what it cost, and what is still wrong. No roadmap with dates on it, because a date nobody can keep is a broken promise with a timer attached.

If you want to be told when there is something to open, the address box at the bottom of the front page is the whole of it. One email. That is the deal.