We're Building in Public: What's Coming and What We're Learning

We've been heads-down building for the last several weeks, and we wanted to share where things stand. Not a polished announcement. Just an honest look at what we've built, what's working, what we're still figuring out, and what's coming next.

If you've read our earlier posts, you know the thesis: goals are easier to pursue and harder to abandon when other people are watching, participating, and caring alongside you. Here's what happened when we turned that into software.

What we've built so far

The core of Crewmates is live and in the hands of a small test group. Real people, real crews, real habits being tracked every day.

The experience starts with creating a crew. You pick a name, set a timezone, and get a six-character join code. Drop that code in your group chat. Your friends click a link and they're in. No app download, no lengthy signup flow. Just a URL.

Once you're in, the crew dashboard is where everything lives. The habit tracker is the emotional centerpiece. You define your habits, and the crew sees everyone's progress side by side on a shared grid. Daily check-offs, weekday-only schedules, multi-log habits where you need to hit a target count. All of it visible to the people who matter.

The activity feed is just as important as we expected. Every habit logged, every calendar event checked into, every notebook edited. It all flows through the feed in real time, and your crewmates can react with emoji. One tap. A fire emoji that says "I see you" without requiring a full conversation.

We also shipped a shared calendar and collaborative notebooks. Both were originally scoped for later, but they kept coming up as things people wanted immediately. The calendar lets you share events with your crew and check in to confirm you actually showed up. The notebooks give your crew a persistent home for reference material instead of letting it get buried in a group chat.

And then there are crew streaks. Consecutive days where every single member of the crew hit all their habits. Your failure breaks everyone's streak. That's the whole point. The streak counter sits at the top of the dashboard, and it turns out people really don't want to be the one who resets it to zero.

What surprised us

Three things we didn't fully anticipate.

First: the crew streak changed behavior more than we expected. We knew it would matter. We didn't know it would matter this much. Individual streaks are motivating in the way any habit tracker's streak is. But crew streaks add a dimension that's qualitatively different. When your streak is yours alone, breaking it is a private disappointment. When it's shared, breaking it means letting people down. That distinction turned out to be the single strongest driver of daily check-ins.

Second: the activity feed gets checked even when people have nothing to log. We assumed the feed would be a byproduct of other actions. You do something, it appears, your crewmates see it. What actually happens is that people open the app to check the feed first, even before logging their own habits. They want to see what their crewmates have been up to. They want to know if they're behind. The feed isn't just a record of activity. It's a source of ambient awareness, and that ambient awareness is itself a motivator. Seeing that two out of three crewmates already logged their morning habits creates a pull that no push notification can replicate.

Third: timezone handling was harder than almost anything else. This sounds boring. But when your crewmates are in different cities, the question "what counts as today?" stops being simple. A crew with members in New York and Hong Kong needs a shared understanding of when the day resets. We ended up giving each crew its own timezone setting so everyone's working off the same clock. It's a small decision that had big downstream effects on streak calculations, feed ordering, and the "who's active today" indicator.

What we're still figuring out

We don't have all the answers. Here are some questions we're actively thinking through.

When a crew member goes quiet, what should the app do? Right now, the visible gap in the habit grid does most of the heavy lifting. If someone doesn't log for a day, their crewmates notice because the grid has an obvious empty row. But we're thinking about building a nudge system where the app prompts crewmates to check in: "Alex hasn't logged today. Want to send a nudge?" The key constraint is that nudges should always be human-initiated. The app surfaces the opportunity. The human provides the care. Getting that balance right is a design problem we haven't fully solved.

How do you balance crew streaks with real life? People get sick. They go on vacation. They have bad weeks. A crew streak that demands perfection seven days a week will eventually feel punitive instead of motivating. We're exploring ideas around flexible scheduling (habits that only count on weekdays, habits with a target of three times per week instead of daily) and thinking about how to handle planned absences gracefully. The research on social comparison is clear that poorly calibrated pressure discourages people instead of motivating them. We want the crew streak to feel like supportive accountability, not surveillance.

What's the right notification strategy? Our thesis depends on nudges and reminders, but the difference between a valued nudge and an annoying ping is razor-thin. Our test group currently communicates through their own group chats outside the app. We haven't shipped notifications yet. When we do, getting the frequency, timing, and tone right will matter more than almost any feature we build.

What's next

We're working on a few things we're genuinely excited about.

Wrapped recaps are high on the list. Inspired by Spotify Wrapped, these are periodic summaries of your crew's activity. Not just individual stats. The interesting stuff is relational: how many days you and a specific crewmate both hit your goals. How many perfect crew days you had this month. The longest streak, the biggest comeback, the toughest week. We want the stats to feel like a shared story, not a personal report card. The data infrastructure to support this is already in place because every action in the app flows through a generic event system we built from day one.

We're also thinking a lot about accountability pacts. These are different from habits. A habit is recurring and indefinite. A pact is a specific, time-bound promise made to your crew: "I will finish the pitch deck by Friday." A named commitment with a deadline and an audience. When the deadline arrives, the outcome gets recorded. Fulfilled or not. Your crew sees the result. Over time, your pact completion rate becomes a track record of following through on promises.

And there's the broader block system. Right now, every crew gets the same set of features. The long-term vision is that crews choose which blocks to activate and arrange them to fit their purpose. A job-hunting crew activates different blocks than a fitness crew or a pair of cofounders. Same app, completely different configurations. We're getting closer, but we're being deliberate about not shipping it before the core loop is rock-solid.

Come build with us

That's where we are. A working product, a small group using it every day, a list of things we're learning, and a longer list of things we want to build.

If this sounds like something your crew needs, we'd love to have you try it. We're opening up the waitlist now and letting people in over the coming weeks. Grab a spot, tell your people, and we'll see you on the dashboard.