Not everything we build is a platform. Two of the things furthest along right now are deliberately small, and both came out of the one unallocated day a week that everyone here gets.
Noted
Noted is for the dates that fall through the gap between your calendar and your memory. Not meetings — your calendar is fine at meetings. The other kind: an anniversary, a warranty running out, a visa renewal window opening, the boiler service, the day the car insurance quietly auto-renews at a worse price.
These have three things in common. They matter, they are annual or one-off rather than weekly, and you find out you have missed them afterwards. A calendar entry made a year in advance is a notification you have already learned to dismiss.
Noted is a list of things with dates and a habit of nagging, and it does not have an account. There is no reason for us to know when your passport expires.
Gotta Go
This one started as a joke and refused to die. You are in a city you do not know, with a child or a coffee or a medical reason, and you need a toilet. Map apps are bad at this, because a toilet is not a business and mostly does not want to be found.
Gotta Go is the nearest public toilet, from open map data, with the details that decide whether it is any use to you: is it accessible, is there a baby-changing table, does it cost, is it open right now. And crucially — it searches offline. The moment you most need this app is often the moment you have one bar of signal in a basement, in a country where your data does not work. An app that needs a connection to tell you where a toilet is has misunderstood the assignment.
Why we bother with small apps
Because they are where we find things out cheaply. Gotta Go's offline search is the reason we know how to ship a usable local dataset on a phone. Noted's no-account design is the argument we keep having about every other app, settled once in code rather than repeatedly in a channel.
Both are in development, neither has a date, and both will be free.