As part of my early research for greetful, I signed up to a competitor app. Purely research, obviously.

Just to set the scene, my vision for greetful has always been simple: a gentle nudge when a special moment is coming up, so you can pop in and get your message sorted, ready to send.

Calm. Simple. Connection made easy.

Life isn’t perfect. Things go wrong.

You can give up
or you can adjust, improvise, and somehow make it work.

There’s a moment we all recognise.

You’re thinking about someone who is going through a tough time. Your heart goes out to them and you feel you want to reach out.

Because you care. You genuinely want them to feel seen.

But your brain suddenly behaves like a blank Word document. Cursor blinking. Nothing happening.

We need to put ourselves into our posts, blogs and writing. That’s what people want to see. That’s why they come back. They enjoy getting a glimpse of our personality. A simple, sloppy prompt can’t give AI that.

Often, when you have setbacks, there is a way through. It may not be ideal, but you need to decide if it is worth taking the new path that has just opened up in front of you.

Because the person you want to reach doesn’t see you staring at your phone screen for half an hour, willing the words to come. They just know that nothing arrived.

LinkedIn is exactly the kind of platform that sends my patience into hiding. Nothing behaves the way you expect it to. Nothing is where you think it should be. At least, not for me.

We remember someone we love while we are driving. We think of a friend while we are in the supermarket queue. We think “I’ll send a message as soon as I get home”, then immediately forget because the dog needs letting out or the washing machine starts beeping.

Somewhere along the way, technology stopped feeling futuristic and started feeling ordinary. It slipped quietly into our routines, not with fanfare, but with usefulness.

That’s when I realised connection wasn’t disappearing. It was just becoming a lost art. Not because we don’t care, but because we’re overwhelmed, distracted, stretched thin, and constantly trying to keep up.

The greetings that mean the most aren’t the huge gestures, they’re the ones that arrive.

You don't need to know everything to start - here's the proof.