This isn't a tech blog. This is an evening. February, cold, Friday. Four friends in my kitchen, nobody had a grander plan than eating and catching up.
The games cabinet was played out
We were going to do something after dinner. The games shelf was exhausted — the standard rounds of Catan, Codenames and 30 Seconds had passed the peak of the "they're-fun-but-we-know-them-by-heart" curve.
Someone suggested: "let's write a story, one person writes a sentence, passes it on, next one continues." Nobody had much appetite for learning something new. But this was simple enough.
The rules
Four sheets. Everyone wrote the first sentence of a story. Pass it on. Everyone wrote the next sentence on each sheet. Fold so only the last sentence is visible. Pass it on. Three rounds per sheet. Then read aloud.
It was a quarter-hour of messy writing. We were mostly focused on not knocking over the wine and finding the pencils.
The reading aloud
Then came the reveal. First story — the opening was something ordinary about a woman in a supermarket. Second sentence from someone else suddenly a drone crashing through the ceiling. Third sentence a police officer asking the drone to show its birth certificate. Everyone was in stitches.
Second story: somewhere in the middle someone wrote "He reached out his hand and the world stood still." And the following player wrote "Unfortunately he had forgotten to bring his shopping list." Nobody could have invented that. It just emerged, because there were two writers with different intentions.
An hour later
I remember that around eleven, the four of us were standing in the kitchen, and someone said: "you know this should really be an app?" Everyone nodded. One added: "but with AI sentences in between, otherwise it gets too chaotic." Another: "and at the end some kind of book where you can read it back."
I wrote those sentences on the back of one of the sheets of paper. Without realising it would become the first roadmap of something that would be live a few months later.
It wasn't a pivot, it was an evening
Many projects begin with a serious business plan. This one didn't. This began with a kitchen, half a bottle of wine, and a strange sentence about a drone that didn't have a birth certificate.
Sometimes that's enough.