What I learned from our first 50 alpha users

50 Users, 2 Months, A Lot I Got Wrong

I onboarded the first 50 alpha users over the last two months. Here's what I learned.

What surprised me

People invited family before friends

I assumed the first invite would be a close friend. It wasn't.

The most common first invite was a family member. A parent, a sibling, a partner. That changes how I thought about onboarding. The "first circle" isn't always your professional network. Often it's the people you share your life with.

Goals were smaller than I expected

I built thinking people would share big, ambitious goals. They didn't.

The first goal new users shared was almost always small and concrete.

• "Finish the renovation."
• "Get to the gym 3x this week."
• "Find a new dentist."

That's a feature, not a bug.

Small goals build the trust required to share bigger ones.

Updates were the killer feature

I expected goals and milestones to be the wow moments. But the feature people came back to most was updates.

Just being able to post a small note about how a goal is going, and have the right people see it, was the thing that mattered.

Simple.

No performance required.

What I got wrong

Over-invested in the network view

I built a network view that aggregates everyone's goals across your circles. I thought it would be the daily home screen.

It mostly isn't. Users land on their own goals. They navigate to specific people when they want to. I’m rethinking the information architecture.

Notifications were too quiet

I was afraid of being a "loud" app and under-notified. Users told me:

"I want to know when my mom updates her goal. That's the whole point."

I’m tuning notifications up for the right things, and giving users finer-grained control.

Onboarding was too goal-focused

I pushed new users to create a goal in the first session. But many joined because they wanted to help someone else first.

I’m adding an onboarding path for supporters. People who want to show up for someone else's goals before they share their own.

What I’m changing

• New onboarding paths: supporter-first and self-first, depending on intent.
• Smarter notifications: louder by default for close circles, with easy controls.
• Reworked home screen: your goals first, with a better way to peek into your network.
• Family-mode tweaks: better handling of household-level circles.

Thanks

Fifty users isn't a sample size that proves anything. But it's enough to show us where I was wrong.

These people gave me the gift of telling us directly, generously, what wasn't working.

If you're in the alpha and reading this: thank you. I’m building this for you. The only way it gets good is if you keep telling us what I’m missing.If you’re interested in trying it for yourself, come stop by 👋