What's up everyone.

…🫣 sorry for being awol this past month

I killed Dateful. And I'm way more excited about what's next.

Quick version: I spent a couple sessions trying to get browser automation to handle restaurant bookings without OpenTable or Resy’s API. Tried Steel.dev, tried Stagehand of browser automation, tried stitching together API calls from network tabs. Everything worked-ish and was fragile. Every path still left me completely dependent on another company's website not changing—for the one thing that made Dateful worth paying for.

And then Claude launched tasks. You can literally just say "find me a dinner spot Friday and book it." It did that for me, and it was clear any moat was already filling in.

Like I said in the last post—being a wrapper isn’t it.

So I killed it. Under $100 spent, just 2 weeks in, not excited about the problem. No harm, no foul.

Lesson: don't push harder into a market that's closing in on you if you're already bored. Kill it and start something you actually want to build. The whole point of building fast is that killing fast costs you almost nothing.

Follow the fun you want to have, and Dateful looked increasingly less fun.

I owe you all an apology for going dark. Should have written this a month ago because that’s the whole damn point of this letter. But I'm here now, and the thing I've been building instead is something I care about way more about.

It’s called Little Moments.

More on my tools, stack, workflow in a following posts — this one's just about what I'm working on and why.

Life disappears. Not the big stuff — you remember your wedding, becoming a parent, moving cities. You remember maybe three real things a month. Everything else vanishes. And it's the everything else that actually makes up your life. The thing your kid said at breakfast. The moment on the porch. The random Tuesday where something quietly shifted.

I genuinely struggle to remember what happened last Tuesday…

Everyone says journaling. And it kills me despite having dabbled with it for years. Open a blank page. Stare at it. Write three paragraphs about your day. Feel like you said nothing meaningful and just listed what you did. Close the app or page. Quit within a week.

And then realistically, whatever you wrote is just a page you’ll never see again.

Little Moments is the opposite of that.

One word or one photo as a trigger. Log one moment. Two minutes max.

You open the app, you get a single prompt—a single word, a photo the app pulls from your camera roll, or a simple question—and you capture whatever comes to mind. Could be three sentences. Could be one. You're not writing a journal entry. You're logging a moment. The smallest true thing from your life at any point.

It prioritizes voice. You can speak your moment — whisper it, even — and the transcription is super accurate. My mate Jacob pushed me to prioritize this early on and he was so right. Telling a story out loud is so much easier and faster than typing one. Less friction, more truth. You can type too, of course. But voice is the default and it changes the whole feel. More on how I built this in a separate post.

Then you close the app and come back tomorrow.

Every consumer app that works has one dead simple constraint to start. Vine had six seconds. Wordle had one word per day, same for everyone. BeReal had one unfiltered photo to share at the same random time. TikTok had short videos set to music.

Little Moments: one prompt, one moment, two minutes. Goodbye.

The daily prompt rotates between three types — a single word (everyone gets the same one), a photo the app pulls from your camera roll for you, or a simple question. You don't choose. The app chooses. You can't swap the word. That's deliberate. Choosing what to write about is half of why journaling feels heavy. Remove the choice and you remove the friction.

No blank page, ever. No “What should I write about?”, or “What did happen today?”

Friction and thought is what i think can kill a consumer app. People…I…don’t want to feel like i have to do work.

And here's the thing I didn't fully expect when I started: the prompts aren't about today. That was a hard decision I made early on. The question right now is: "What's a little moment from the past few days you'd share at the dinner table?" Photos can be from months ago. Words trigger memories from years back, sometimes decades. That's the magic I want to build — it's not about finding a moment today (that's pressure and friction), it's that we all have a lifetime of moments on their way to being forgotten. The prompt is just a trigger of association.

My friend Mitch nailed it when he said it's a Wordle mechanic. You show up, you do the thing, you leave. And you look forward to coming back tomorrow to see what you get.

There’s a variable reward in there that is genuinely fun. I know it.

I considered adding some XP mechanic for longer moments or more entries per day. Decided against it. The whole point is in and out. If I make you feel like you should be doing more, I've broken the thing that makes it work.

Something I need to measure over time: which prompt types work best, which ones get people sharing, and which fall flat. And a question I must answer: should I constrain even more, and have only one type of prompt everyday…vs 3 types.

That's a PostHog problem.

I've already got PostHog instrumented in Little Moments — used their AI to install it, which I'll write a whole post on because it was kind of unbelievable. Here's why it's the first thing I add to every project:

Also, I just love them. At work, they literally called us up and told us we were spending too much money with them and showed us how to spend less. Then they send me 2 free (amazing) t-shirts. Wtf PostHog…how you do business is the stuff of legends.

Add it to your project. Free tier, zero friction, best team ever → posthog.com

Streaks. That's it. Write your moment, keep the streak. Miss a day, lose it.

Most apps bloat streaks with freezes and multipliers and bonus levels.

I almost said yes. Almost.

Then I said no. The friction of losing it is the feature. The quiet motivation of not wanting to break something you've been building. Keep it simple stupid.

Duolingo's retention PM told Lenny that streaks are the single most impactful feature at a $14 billion company — they have over 9 million users on year-plus streaks. But even he said the streak only works because the underlying thing people are doing is rewarding. The mechanic is hollow if the daily action sucks. That's why the two-minute constraint matters so much. The moment itself has to feel good — fast, easy, meaningful — for the streak to mean anything.

Nothing must ever feel like work.

Two minutes is make-or-break. And genuinely I don't know if it's right.

It might be too long. Enough time to overthink, which defeats the purpose. The magic is supposed to be speed — capture the first thing that comes to mind, don't polish it, move on. One minute might be better. Maybe even less.

I was walking to coffee yesterday and knew I had 2 minutes to spare, so I pulled it out, the prompt removed any thinking, and speaking made it so simple. The experience felt good.

This is the biggest product decision I'll be watching over the next few weeks. If any of you try the app—and I hope some of you do—this is the thing I most want your honest take on.

The daily moment is the core loop. But beyond it, you can add more moments whenever you want — each triggered by a new word, a photo the app surfaces for you, or a question.

I added this, because after I got the first hook, I genuinely wanted to keep capturing little moments. I was genuinely curious what the next trigger would be and what I’d remember.

The photo one is my personal favorite. The app pulls up a photo from your camera roll—you don't go looking for it, it finds one for you and it makes sure it’s not some crappy screenshot or low quality pic— and you talk to it. It's such a nice surprise to land on something you forgot you took and have a memory rush back. Cataloging moments based on photos you actually took is addictive in a way I didn't expect.

And then there's the bigger vision—a searchable archive of every moment you've ever captured (I'm calling it the Capsule), monthly Chapters that synthesize your moments into a narrative, and something called Threads that spots patterns across your memories and builds a graph of how they connect over time. But that's all a separate post. This one is about the daily habit and why the constraint makes it work.

I'm 10 days in with 14 people testing on TestFlight. Very early. The app exists, the core loop works, and people are using it and giving me real feedback which over the past weekend literally led me to a major refactor.

I have a lot to share about how I built it and what I did so wrong so soon—the onboarding philosophy, how AI fits in very naturally, the monetization approach (it's unconventional). Plenty more coming on the what and the how.

If you want to try Little Moments, reply to this email. I'll send you the TestFlight link. Fair warning—it might come with a follow-up phone call from me because I want to hear how it feels for you. And I won't be able to get everyone in right away. But if you're curious, reach out.

I'll report back soon folks. I’m excited about this idea it feels good.
— Jaryd

(view my stack of non-negotiable building tools here)