Simply Kind: a calm daily ritual
A gentle intention & reflection app: one kind thought in the morning, one honest look back at night. Designed, built and shipped to the App Store solo, with calm as the organising design principle.
Simply Kind is a daily ritual small enough to actually keep: 30 seconds in the morning to set an intention, two minutes at night to reflect, log a gratitude and rate the day. Show up four days in a row and the app starts giving back, with a gentle AI summary of what your entries are really saying. Every month closes with a longer look back.
The whole point is to weave kindness and gratitude into ordinary days, and the design carries its share of that job: joy and energy in the morning, calm at night, expressed through the app's day and night modes. Both soothing, zero pressure.
It's the second product I've shipped as a founder, built around my day job. This one I took all the way through the App Store: design, build, review, release.
Calm and kindness as design anchor
Every screen earns its place by lowering the temperature. There's no feed and nothing to scroll for the sake of scrolling. The app never scolds you for missing a day. Mood is a gentle one-to-five, not a score to optimise. Even the insights, like your brightest day of the week or the gratitude themes you keep returning to, are phrased as observations, never judgements.
Privacy as a feature, not a checkbox
A reflection app holds people's most honest sentences, and I designed the trust model with the same defensive defaults I use for money flows in Fyxes. There are no advertising or analytics SDKs at all. The pattern-spotting happens on the phone, not on a server. And leaving is a first-class flow: export every entry as a file, or delete the account and every word with it, in one tap. The privacy policy isn't legal wallpaper; it describes an architecture that can't misuse the data because it never collects it.
Keep calm and carry on
Stack Me is a pocket ritual tucked into the app: when the day gets loud, you stack pebbles. It mimics real-world pebble stacking, a meditative game, gravity and all. And when it's all too overwhelming, a five-step guided exercise is there to help ground you.
A business model that matches the values
The daily ritual is free forever, with your last seven days in view. Simply Kind Plus keeps every day you've ever written. That's the whole model: monetise memory, not anxiety. The cutoff is honest, too. Free users can see exactly where their history ends and what Plus keeps, an upgrade moment designed as an empty state rather than a trap. No paywalled streaks, no upsell interrupting a reflection.
Where it's at
Simply Kind shipped to the App Store in July 2026, iPhone first, with Android next in line behind Google Play's closed-testing gate. From first sketch to approved release, every design, product and copy decision was mine, which makes it the clearest expression of how I think a daily reflection app should feel: quiet, kind and finished.
It's also the direct product of what Fyxes taught me. This time I shipped the smallest kind thing that could earn a user, and I'm letting real demand arrive before I build for scale.