Independent product
Meet Me Gently
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A deck of connection cards for two people who already know each other — not an app and not a dating product. Five paths: Steady, Open, Reach, Repair, and the sealed adults-only After Dark. Goes on sale 1 November.
A deck of conversation cards for two people who already know each other, built on one rule printed on every card: any card can be passed, paused, swapped or stopped, at any time, with no explanation owed.
What it is
A card deck, physical and digital, in the tradition of games like We’re Not Really Strangers: something two people play at a table, not an app and not a dating product. It is attachment-informed, which is not the same as therapy, and it says so. The core deck is 108 cards in four paths — Steady (can we feel safe here?), Open (can we know each other?), Reach (can we move toward each other?) and Repair (can we find our way back?) — 27 cards each. A fifth path, After Dark, is a separate adults-only collection of 108 more cards in two heat levels, sealed until you both invite it in. Every card carries the same line: pass · pause · swap · stop.
You can try it before anything is sold: a 30-card sample deck and a free ten-minute kit, both with no account, and the digital edition works offline. Each card exists as an illustration and as a text-only version; the painterly artwork is made with AI image tools, directed and checked card by card. The physical deck is printed on demand and the whole deck goes on sale on 1 November.
Why I built it
The interesting design problem was the refusal rule. Most conversation decks escalate — deeper questions as you go — which quietly makes stopping feel like failing. Making pass, pause, swap, stop explicit on every single card is what makes people willing to go deep, because they know they can leave. Paths rather than levels follow from the same idea: you pick the need that is starving right now instead of grinding through a ladder, and Repair gets its own path so the hardest conversations never ambush anyone.
It is also the most physical thing I have made on the software side. A card has a trim size, rounded corners, a colour for each path and a back, a box that has to fit — decisions I know from designing objects and interiors, applied to a product that lives half on a screen and half on a table.
What I learned
You cannot fix a story mid-argument; you have to change the state first. That is a relationship observation, but it turned out to be the product architecture too: the rule is not a feature of the deck, it is the mechanism.
A second lesson was about claims. Other decks already let you skip a question, so "we invented consent" would have been false and easy to disprove. What I can honestly say is narrower and checkable: the exit is printed on every card, stopping is a named move, and Repair is its own path.
