Why I built Hayley (and what it feels like watching strangers use it.

Why I built Hayley (and what it feels like watching strangers actually use it).

I built Hayley during a period where I was making a lot of decisions that mattered, the kind where you can't stop circling the same thought from six different angles. I didn't need more advice. I needed somewhere to say the thing out loud and hear it back clearly enough to know what I actually thought.

I was already using LLMs daily, including to help build Hayley. But in those specific moments of confusion or circling, they never quite gave me what I needed. Too much advice, not enough reflection. I didn't want answers, I wanted to hear my own thinking back clearly. That gap is the whole reason Hayley exists.

Speak for 60 seconds. Get back an insight, a pattern, and one question worth sitting with. Private, on-device transcription, nothing leaves your phone. Not a chatbot, not therapy, a thinking companion.

We're still small. A handful of paying users, most of them strangers who found Hayley through the App Store with zero marketing behind it. But watching someone you've never met open the app, use it, and come back the next day hits differently than any download number could.

We're now testing on Android ahead of a wider relaunch. Curious if anyone else has felt that specific gap, where the tools that are supposed to help you think just end up talking at you instead.