For the people in the room.
We make software for communities, players and friend groups. If a thing is good for the room and bad for the chart, we build it anyway.
The internet is at its best as a group chat.
We design for the people inside the room, not for the ones counting from outside it. A feature is good if the conversation got better. Not if the session got longer.
Settles arguments. This is the one that decides most of them, and it is why some obvious features never got built.
Software should feel like somebody cared while making it.
Playful, colourful, a little odd on purpose. Hence the characters, the shapes placed by hand, and nothing taken off a template.
Leaving is as easy as arriving.
No dark patterns, no engagement traps, and the off switch sits where you would go looking for it. A product that has to trap you to keep you was not worth keeping.
No quarterly graph to please.
Independent, and based in France. Nobody is waiting on a number from us this quarter, so we can take the time to get a thing right before it goes out.
Make It Matter.
A test, not a slogan.
If what we are about to ship would not matter to the person on the other end of it, it does not go out. That is the whole idea, and it is the last question asked before anything ships.
What that rules out.
Four things we could do, that would work, and that we are not doing.
An engagement feed
A ranked, endless feed grows the numbers and wrecks the room. Our products show you what the people you chose said, in the order they said it.
Selling what you say to each other
Messages between people are not inventory. Lifecheck exists partly because the usual way of proving someone is human means watching them across the rest of the web.
Passing AI off as a person
Supernova labels what it writes, where you read it rather than in a footnote at the bottom of a page nobody opens.
Announcing things that do not exist
Hereld is in build, and every page that mentions it says so. No waiting list, no countdown. It gets a launch when it is ready.
Fortized was the first thing we shipped.
A community platform for gamers and the friend groups around them. Whatever ships next is held to the same four.