Always do the best you can.
That is the whole of what we stand for, and everything below is what it costs. These are not aspirations pinned to a wall. They are the rules that decide what gets built here, and most of them are decisions to not do something that would otherwise be easy, profitable, or both.
People, privacy, transparency — in that order
The promise is narrower than the one most apps make, and we would rather keep a narrow promise than break a broad one: what is on your device stays there unless you choose otherwise, and we say plainly when that boundary moves.
Not “we never touch your data”. That claim is easy to make and, for anyone who ships more than one app, usually false somewhere. badmintho Community has real accounts on a real server, because playing badminton with other people needs other people. We write that down rather than hiding it behind a privacy badge — every app’s privacy policy names what leaves and what does not.
Collecting nothing is a constraint, and we took it deliberately
Most software teams know which button you pressed. We mostly do not, and that is a choice with a bill attached.
It means no dashboard tells us which feature nobody found. It means a design mistake can sit there for months. It means the honest answer to “do people use this?” is often we do not know — so we have to ask, and read what people write to us, and use the apps ourselves every day until the rough edges become intolerable.
Working blind is harder. It is also the point.
No politics
An app for tracking your sleep should track your sleep. A badminton scorer should score badminton. Nothing else gets smuggled in — no causes, no campaigns, no opinions you did not ask for from a piece of software you opened to log your lunch.
Follow what people actually want — even when it questions all of this
This is the uncomfortable one, and it stays on the list precisely because it is uncomfortable.
Software follows its users or it dies. Somewhere ahead there is probably a feature people genuinely want that sits badly with something written on this page. We would rather notice that moment and argue about it in the open than pretend the collision cannot happen, or quietly redefine the value until it stops objecting.
Flow, and make sense
An app should behave the way you already expected it to. If a screen needs explaining, the screen is wrong — not the person reading it.
Which leads to the same three rules over and over: look for simplicity, fewer clicks and taps, form follows function. Every feature starts by being cut down. The version that ships is usually the third one, after the first two turned out to be doing too much.
Eudaemonia
The old Greek word for flourishing — living well over a whole life, rather than feeling good this afternoon.
It is the reason slotho’s daily number is not a health score and never claims to be one. It summarises something narrower and more honest: how close to your own sensible targets was today. It is also why nothing here has streaks to protect, badges to chase, or a notification designed to make you anxious enough to open it. We wrote up exactly how that score is built, and the four things it refuses to do.
Prototype, dog-food, fail fast
Build the smallest version that could possibly be useful. Use it yourself, daily, for real — not in a demo. Most ideas die there, which is the cheapest place for an idea to die.
What survives that gets shipped. Stay curious, keep learning, go and look at the unfamiliar thing. It is possible to build great things — that is not optimism, it is the observation that most software is mediocre for reasons that are entirely fixable.
What we stand for can change
A mission that cannot be revised is a slogan. If something here turns out to be wrong, it gets rewritten — and the rewrite will say so rather than quietly appearing one day.
Photo by Marcos Paulo Prado on Unsplash