Muse

The story

Wordle, but nobody to beat.

Like half the internet, I love Wordle. My friends and family play it too, and for a while our group chats filled up every morning with those little grids of green and yellow squares. Which is charming, until you realize the screenshots are the entire competitive experience. There was no real way to compare, to challenge each other, to hold a streak over someone's head at dinner.

So I built our own version, in French, for my family in Canada. It started as a gift of sorts and spread the way these things do, one household of friends and family at a time, until the morning grid ritual belonged to us instead of to a newspaper.

The craft

A side door into consumer mobile.

Muse is one of the side projects that lets me dabble in the consumer mobile world, a world away from B2B software: small scope, real users who mostly share my last name, and every detail mine to fuss over. No roadmap, no metrics review, just the exact right word at the exact right time.

What it taught me

The physics of coming back.

B2B SaaS trains you to think in funnels, seats, and workflows: value delivered, quarter after quarter, to someone whose job requires showing up. A consumer game runs on entirely different physics. Nobody has to open Muse. The product earns its place one morning at a time, through repeated use, engagement, and the gentle 'addiction' of a daily ritual: the streak you protect, the reward that lands at just the right moment, the small pride of a score worth sending to the family chat.

Designing those loops, the comeback triggers and the reward functions that pay out over time, turned out to be the most transferable thing about the whole project. It changed how I think about every product since: even the most serious enterprise software is better when someone actually wants to open it tomorrow.