Why I’m making Familiar.
For a long time, anything I needed to do by a certain time needed an alarm. Meetings, calls, errands, the return I kept meaning to drop off; if it mattered, it had an alarm. And alarms have a life cycle. You snooze one because you’re in the middle of something, then you snooze it again, and after enough of that the sound turns into background noise and you stop hearing it at all. Some things got done; some got rescheduled to a quieter time that turned out not to be quieter, and some I found out about too late.
I looked for something better and found pieces of it everywhere. There was an app for habits, an app for the calendar, an app for mood, an app for a focus timer, an app for jotting things down. None of the ideas were new, and none of them lived together. I didn’t want five apps; I wanted one that understood how my day was actually going and worked with that.
So I started building it.
About me
I’m Paula. I build software for a living. Familiar is the thing I wanted for myself: a calendar that moves things when I don’t have the energy for them, habits that count the day I was kind to myself as much as the day I ran, and insights that notice when the thing I booked for thirty minutes keeps taking forty-five.
Familiar is, for now, a team of one. That has its limits; things move at one person’s pace, and my days are variable too. It also means every decision in the app has a person behind it who actually uses it.
Helper, not manager.
This is the line I keep coming back to. A lot of productivity apps act like a manager: assigning, tracking compliance, evaluating the output, resetting the count when you fall behind. I wanted to build something that acts like a helper instead; something that pays attention, offers what it can, and gets out of the way when you don’t need it.
In practice, that means every piece of feedback in the app is an observation. Streaks pause; they don’t reset. When you’re already in the middle of something, it stays quiet. Every feature is yours to turn off. Familiar suggests; you decide.
Your day, the way you feel it.
One of the things I cared most about is small and easy to overlook. If I’m still up at one in the morning, that’s still Saturday night to me, and whatever I do then belongs to Saturday. People who work nights feel it even more strongly. I talked it through with people I know who work night shift before I built it, and Familiar’s sense of “today” follows the hours you set for your day, whether you’re up before dawn, up late, on shifts, or on something close to nine to five. It’s meant to feel natural, with nothing for you to think about.
Where we are.
Familiar is in private beta. The heart of it is built and in daily use on web and mobile: your familiar, the dials, the calendar and scheduling, habits, the timer, capture, the journal, wellness check-ins, insights, and the morning and evening flows. I’m bringing people in a few at a time while I keep working on it, and the people who’ve let me into their days early are the reason it keeps getting gentler.
If you’d like to be one of them, join the waitlist. Glad you’re here.
Join the waitlist.
Familiar is in private beta, with people coming in a few at a time. Leave your email and you’ll get a note when there’s an invitation for you. No spam. No more than one email a month while Familiar is in beta.