02/19/25
He replies in 3 minutes: “Same. Let’s finish one thing by midnight.”
There’s something about hearing his exhaustion—the gravel of late-night caffeine, the smirk in his sarcasm—that pulls me off the couch. There’s no pep talk. No guilt. It just feels like an invitation to move together.
23 minutes later, I DM him a screenshot of an essay I’ve been avoiding. He fires back a blurry photo of his CS homework.
***
I wonder why this worked. I’ve been absolutely dog shit about getting work done recently—Pomodoro timers abandoned like grocery lists in the rain, Notion templates so elaborate they felt like IKEA furniture. I’ve set countless reminders, with not much luck.How has a 5’5” Indian boy 3,829 miles away gotten me off my ass?
***
We’ve all promised to lock in before. We trade plans like sacred texts—7 AM gym, 10 pages of Atomic Habits, work until our eyes bleed—as if suffering is a prerequisite for success. Grind in silence, emerge transformed.
But life isn’t directed by A24. A laptop of work is nothing in front of the Lakers. {insert example #2 here}.
We don’t fail because we’re lazy. We failed because no one tells us how lonely discipline feels.
***
We’re raised on anime protagonists training in the rain, Instagram influencers peddling “sleep deprivation as strategy,” or TikTokers monetizing their breakdowns. Last week, I watched a LinkedIn influencer post The past two months have been hard building this—this being a Chrome extension that auto-likes more LinkedIn posts. No generation before us has had to watch a TikTok edit of someone’s edited hustle porn scored to Hozier’s Sweet, all golden-hour lighting and slow-motion keyboard taps. Real life has no soundtrack, and your life’s camera angles will be dirty, chaotic, handheld.
We’ve all played along. We mute group chats to focus, delete Instagram to lock in, and call it discipline.
***
The same happened to me and Prakrat. For a while, Prakrat and I tried shared notes—the 7 AM gym, read 10 pages, the LeetCode grind, and other motivated college student classics.
It worked until it didn’t.
I’d type “Read 20 pages” while rewatching Suits. Prakrat logged a debugged API when he’d really just stared at terminal. Text lets you lie with dignity. We even orphaned our own child— opening our sharedNotes, only to see 47 unchecked boxes, and close it as fast as ever.
Fuck, we both think. We sold the bag.
***
Peer accountability is not a novel concept. In 1727, Benjamin Franklin founded the Junto Club—a ragtag group of Philadelphia tradesmen who met weekly to debate ethics, share book recommendations, and grill each other on personal growth.Centuries later, we’ve outsourced this urge to apps.
“The misalignment in current social platforms isn't technological but neurological—we've built systems optimized for dopaminergic spike-based engagement…when our social reward circuitry evolved for tonic, not phasic, activation patterns,” Khalid A. from University of Minesotta writes.
Bereal stumbled into this. A daily nudge at 2:17 PM to post your unedited life. For 90 seconds, we shared microwaved ramen, Excel hellscapes, unkept hair—the mundane glue of existence.
This is far from innovation. This mimicked the ambient presence of prehistory—tribes grinding grain side-by-side, children playing while elders mended tools. Humans have always thrived in shared mundanity. BeReal just added push notifications.
Modern platforms misunderstand this. They chase high-intensity “connection moments”—Facetime calls! Livestreams! Comment threads!—ignoring that humans are pack animals wired for low-bandwidth coexistence. Existing in the same space, sharing the quiet moments, feeling plugged into each other's lives is how we’ve evolved.
We see glimmers of this truth everywhere: Gen Z leaving FaceTime running silently while studying. Virtual coworking spaces where strangers code alongside you. Gaming streams where 10,000 lurkers watch streamers play Minecraft. These are digital breaths, soothed by the click-clack of others. We’re comforted by the rustle of others’ lives—proof we’re not alone.
Except here’s the thing about strangers: Their silence holds no currency. A FocusMate partner won’t care if you relapse into TikTok. A Twitch lurker won’t hear the tremor in you being stuck.
***
All it takes is a friend. That’s what we’re biologically impaired to—to seek connection. We’ve forgotten that the brain craves witnesses, just someone who makes us feel seen. ***
When Prakrat replies “Same. Let’s finish one thing by midnight,” it’s not the words that matter. There’s something deeper—something about his voice: the smirk I can’t see, the yawn he’s swallowing, the third thing. There’s a quiet magic in knowing he’s watching. A part of me doesn’t want to let him down.We switched to voice notes out of laziness. It didn’t require much—no formatting, no bullet points. Little did we know, it would force honesty. We can’t fake a yawn. We can’t mask the truth of being stuck. It also forced us to scale down—one task, one memo at a time.
There’s warmth in this shared inertia—the way send voice-notes followed by work screenshots like secret handshakes. To me, the silence between words matters the most. The pause before Prakrat said Same tells me he was just as lost.
When I’m sore from a run and want to skip recovery, but his sleepy voice goes, “Just walk for 10 mins. I’ll do it, too.” When we’re deep in the trenches of CS homework, his voice goes, “You’ll figure it out chief”
Voice isn’t better because it’s profound. It’s better because it’s human.
***
My most memorable voice note from Prakrat has been a reminder to volunteer at the Fairmont Elementary School, even though I felt like I should apply to an internship instead.James, 5, doesn’t care about my LinkedIn. He cares that I noticed he flips “a” and “q”—that I high-five him when he writes his name right, not Jqmes :)
Unfortunately, the secret that hustle culture ignores is that we’re wired to care about the unscalable. Prehistoric humans didn’t track productivity. They shared stories, pointed at constellations, and dapped each other up on a well-sharpened rock.
Franklin’s Junto Club debated ethics, yes, but probably also bonded over bad beer. James’ joy when he spelled his name right mattered more than any internship offer because joy is the original currency.
***
The little things always deserve to be celebrated—if you just finish a draft, send the email, or do 5 push-ups. Failing forward is to be acknowledged with the people you trust. I would rather hear my boys going LFG than a notification like “Liked your note! Task completed! Streak maintained!”
***
Most productivity tools feel like airports—overstimulating, impersonal, designed for transience. Notion’s curse is its endless customization; you spend hours building dashboards for a life you’re not living. Todoist reduces your ambition to checkboxes. Even FocusMate, for all its quiet grace, treats humans like accountability vending machines—insert 50 minutes, receive focus.Our early sketches were no different—streaks, leaderboards, and productivity scores. But after talking to countless UC Berkeley students, we learned simple is better. Here’s how it works:
- Prakrat whispers to the app. “I need to email that professor by noon.” “Finish React bug today.” “Do 15 push-ups before dinner party.”
- It sends a notification to his people, nothing more than a nudge: “Prakrat needs to hit this task by 4 PM. Roast him if he flakes.”
- I click, hold the walkie-talkie button, and growl: “Remember who’s going to be at dinner. Can’t look small for her 😘”
- Prakrat gets a notification. He clicks. He hears my voice—exhausted, grinning, mildly sarcastic.
Though that’s probably an interaction with us, it can really be anything The point is: you don’t try to focus on a fire; you just do. The warmth of knowing someone that well pulls you in.
The professor email? I’ve seen this boy write 15 pages on Kafka’s bug fetish. I can remind him this email is nothing. I can tell him fixing this React bug is no different from the hashmap problem we were struggled with last week. And as for the push-ups, it’s a good thing I’m tapped into his love life.
At the end of the day, I care that Prakrat’s voice cracks when he says “You got this”—knowing he’s debugging his own disaster. I care that James’ high-five echoes through a 5-second memo.
***
The truth is we can’t build this alone. We’re looking for a engineer, ideally in Swift, and a good designer. Most of all, we would love to talk to someone who shares this vision—we’ve piled heaps of feedback from close friends & college students; we want to share it with you.
It’d be a lie to say we don’t care about scale or disruption. But in the 15 minute discovery calls that turned into 4 hour long conversations, we’ve found the same theme: people care for each other, and feel a need to make themselves and those closest to them into better people.
The core idea—that accountability thrives on human connection—feels urgent. This app prioritizes feelings over features. The should be so simple even your mom can remind you for 5 more push-ups.
The people really seem to fuck with streaks. They deserve it—it’s a reflection of their delayed gratification. People also care about zooming out, seeing progress over time. If someone wants to keep certain things private, stealth goals”—private tasks that still triggered voice nudges from friends. There’s a lot more miscellenous things, but we’ll save it for now.
We even downloading 36 habit tracking apps ourselves to test some popular ones (gamifying, leaderboards, UIs). That is why we are completely open to new ideas, opposing viewpoints, or modifications.
We know what it’s like to think an idea is a banger one evening, and a complete shitter the next.
The process of thinking so deeply about a problem has been so enriching and fulfilling. It’d be incredible to share that with someone.
If you’d like to chat, please reach out to us:
aditya[dot]mehta[at]berkeley[dot]edu & prakrat[at]berkeley[dot]edu