What inspired me to build Trustle? ✨ Like a lot of people, I have spent time in corporate environments where the culture just does not support recognition the way it should. Good work goes unacknowledged, or a quick "well done" gets lost in a busy Slack channel and forgotten by Friday. Constructive feedback, when it does come, often arrives in formats that do not work for everyone: an annual review, a tense one-to-one, or worse, not at all. What always struck me was the absence of any kind of record. Feedback, whether it is a genuine compliment or a moment of real honesty, lands once and then disappears. There is no trail, no pattern, no way to look back and say this is how far I have come. That felt like a missed opportunity, both for individuals and for the relationships that hold teams and families together. Trustle was born out of that frustration. 🏡 What problem was I trying to solve? 🎯 The honest answer is that most people do not really know how they are coming across to the people closest to them, at work or at home. Not because no one has opinions, but because the conditions for sharing them safely rarely exist. Feedback is either too formal, too rare, or too loaded with context to land well. And even when it does happen, it evaporates. There is no continuity, no data, no way to track whether things are actually getting better over time. People are left guessing: am I improving? Am I appreciated? Does any of this even matter? Trustle solves for that. It creates a private, low-pressure space where the people in your circle can give and receive honest feedback regularly. Not once a year, not in a performance review room, but as an ongoing habit. And crucially, it logs everything so you can start to see real patterns: who is thriving, who needs encouragement, what themes keep coming up, and how the health of your relationships is trending over time. 📊 The goal was never to create another HR tool. It was to give people something much simpler: a way to feel genuinely seen by the people who matter. How did my process or approach evolve during the launch? 🔄 Trustle started as something quite personal. The original vision was entirely family-focused: a way for households to build healthier communication habits, to move beyond assumptions and actually tell each other, in writing, what they appreciated or what they needed more of. Families are complicated, and I genuinely believed that structured, private feedback could change how they function day-to-day. But somewhere in the implementation phase, something interesting happened. As I was building out the analytics, the Sentiment Drift chart, Member Insights, Common Themes, the Circle Health score, I kept catching myself thinking: this is exactly what a manager needs on a Monday morning. The same dynamics that make feedback hard in families make it hard in teams. The same absence of data. The same reluctance to say something real. So the product evolved. The circle model turned out to be just as natural for a five-person startup team as it was for a household. The analytics that would help a parent understand their family's mood over time are the same ones a team lead needs to spot who is disengaging before it becomes a problem. I did not change the core; I just opened the door wider. 🏢 What I also had not fully anticipated was how much the structure of the product itself, the tiered plans, the Pro analytics, the Enterprise multi-circle view, would be shaped by real use cases emerging during the build. Features like bulk invite, organisation-level metrics, and CSV export were not in the original brief. They came from asking: if a company actually deployed this across departments, what would they need? The answer kept pulling the product in a direction I had not planned for, and I am glad it did. 💡

Trustle

Build trust where it matters!

Build trust where it matters!