Their most demanding user

Pally is an app that helps you keep up with the people in your life. I used it every day and had opinions. The founders, Haz and Wyatt, had refunded eighty thousand dollars of sales and were trying to figure out why people signed up and drifted away.

I told them the four things they were treating as separate features were one mechanism: how someone gets referred, what they see in the first minute, what makes them come back, and why they stay. Then I designed the piece that connects them: when a user refers a friend, the app writes a personal introduction and starts the friend with the referrer’s context already in place.

They put me on their top plan for free. On a call in August, Haz agreed to build the feature and we became partners. Wyatt’s words: “You’re our core user right now.”