Why I Built Kinu: A Founder's Story

I don't have his phone number. I'm not sure what city he lives in. The last time we spoke was about ten years ago.

But for more than a decade, our families camped every summer on the same stretch of the Croatian coast. Two months a year with a group of friends: catching crabs on the shore, playing every sport we could improvise, inventing our own games, and later, as teenagers, talking about how to get girls. Mostly, though, it was him and me, picking up right where we left off like no time had passed.

There's a photo from those summers on the wall of my old room at my parents' house: the two of us on a dock, sunburnt, maybe twelve.

After we lost touch I tried reaching out a couple of times. A text here and there. We saw each other once, and it was already different. The thread that held us together had snapped somewhere, quietly, and neither of us noticed until it was too late to tie it back.

I still think about him. Not with drama. Just the quiet weight of knowing that someone who shaped my summers, my childhood, my sense of what friendship is, is now basically a stranger.

That feeling started everything.

The Pattern

It wasn't just him.

A close friend from high school. Four years of talking about everything. Then university. Same city, different lives. Daily became weekly became silent. I never noticed the exact moment it stopped.

A group of friends from college. We studied psychology together, spent hours debating life and people. After graduation everyone scattered, some to other cities, some to other countries. I told myself I'd stay in touch. I meant it every time I thought it. But thinking isn't doing.

Every time, the same structure. The friendship was real. The intention was genuine. But intention without infrastructure doesn't survive the moves, the graduations, the new cities. Nobody had prepared me for how much deliberate effort maintaining friendships as an adult actually takes. The relationships didn't end. They evaporated.

And the pattern isn't mine alone. The data on the friendship recession shows this is happening to nearly everyone.

The Realization

I spent a long time feeling guilty about all of it. Then it clicked: I wasn't bad at caring. I was bad at remembering to act on it. I thought about these people all the time. I just never sent the message.

What I Tried First

Nothing sophisticated. Calendar reminders, and a running mental list of people I meant to reach out to, carried around like quiet debt.

The reminders felt hollow. "Call mom" sitting between "dentist appointment" and "pay electricity bill" strips the meaning out of the action. A person you love, reduced to a task.

I looked at personal CRMs. The language alone made me close the tab. "Nurture your network." "Follow up with contacts." These are my friends, not leads in a pipeline. I tried two anyway, imported my Facebook, LinkedIn, and phone contacts, and found myself staring at more than 3,000 people I didn't want to see there. The gap between personal CRMs and relationship apps was something I felt viscerally before I could articulate it.

Everything I found was built for networking or productivity. Nothing was built for care.

The First Sketch

The idea lived in my head for years before I built anything. I studied psychology: how people connect, why they grow apart, what makes relationships last. Then technology pulled me in, and I spent years building software. There was no lightning bolt. Just the day those two things stopped being separate thoughts. I knew why friendships fade, the guilt cycles, the gap between caring and acting. And I had been building software long enough to know this was a solvable problem.

The first version was a sketch on my phone. A quiet space to hold the people who matter. Not everyone in your address book. Just the ones you'd hate to lose, with enough context to make reaching out feel natural instead of forced.

Building from Slovenia

I run a small design and development studio called Freshlab with my brother. We're based in Slovenia and build digital products for businesses during the day.

Kinu is the night job. And the early morning job. It gets two or three hours most days, built between client work and sleep, with a lot of 5 AM starts and late nights where the line between "today" and "tomorrow" gets blurry. The pace is slow. The direction hasn't wavered.

One decision I made early and never reconsidered: privacy isn't a feature. It's the foundation. Your relationship data is encrypted before it leaves your device, and the server stores only ciphertext, never readable names. I stop short of calling it end-to-end encryption: the sync key still derives from your account, which means I could in principle re-derive it. That is documented rather than glossed over. This wasn't the easy path to build. But when you're asking people to store their most personal relationships in your app, anything less felt wrong.

What Kinu Is Really About

I didn't want to build another social network, another calendar, another CRM. No feeds, no followers, no pipelines. The opposite of all that.

Kinu is care infrastructure. A private, calm place that holds the people who matter to you and helps you show up for them consistently. Not perfectly. Consistently.

The name comes from the Japanese word for silk. Something strong, but gentle. Something you can't see unless you look closely. That's what good relationship care feels like. Invisible to everyone else. Essential to the people who experience it.

Where We Are Now

Kinu launched on the App Store and Google Play in July 2026. Real people use it now. The first reviews are arriving. One is from a mother of two who uses Kinu for her kids' milestones.

It's still built at 5 AM, still alongside the studio. But it's no longer a sketch on my phone.

Neither has the reaction that convinced me to build it. Long before launch, whenever I told someone what Kinu was, they would get quiet for a second. Then they'd name someone. A friend they'd been meaning to call. A relationship they'd let go quiet. An important date they forgot. It still happens, every time.

Nobody says "that's a cool idea." They say a name. That's how I know this is real.

As for the friend from the dock: nothing has changed. Some threads you don't get to tie back. But since Kinu, I reach out more. That part changed.

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If you've been carrying the quiet weight of friendships you meant to maintain, I'd love for you to try Kinu.

Not because it's perfect. It isn't. But the people in your life are worth more than good intentions that never turn into action.

I share the process of building it on X. The mistakes, the small wins. No polish. Just the real thing.