A new way to get your metrics.

A few weeks ago I [Jae] was at an event, and one of our beta testers walked up and told me my Pulse Alerts have been giving him high BP. He said the notification comes in, his heart rate spikes, he opens it, and then he can never tell if the number that moved is a good thing or a bad thing. He just knows something moved, and he cannot stop checking. This is someone who has been inside Adtivity for weeks, who has been getting these alerts in his pocket for weeks, and the line he chose to walk up and lead with was about his blood pressure.

That is what Pulse Alerts is. That is the loop, the part of the product you cannot make yourself look away from. On Monday we shipped the other half of it. We call it Share Cards, and the whole reason it exists is so the founder who just got high BP can post about whatever moved without ever opening a screenshot tool.

Pulse Alerts: the part Bayo has been carrying alone for weeks

Pulse Alerts shipped about two weeks ago, and Bayo has been quietly rebuilding it most days since. The first versions were chunky, by which I mean they technically worked and they were not telling anyone anything useful, because there was not enough signal feeding them to fire well. A Pulse Alert that arrives without the right context is a notification that wastes you. So Bayo has been doing version after version of the intuition layer that decides when an alert is worth your attention, and how to land it without sounding like a chatbot reading a chart out loud.

That is the part of the work nobody writes about. The iteration on the thing that fires the notification, not the notification itself. It is tiring, it is unglamorous, and it has been mostly Bayo on his own. Bayo is one of those steadfast, foundational characters who does not shift, the kind of person who keeps showing up to the same hard problem until it works. We have been pushing him on this because he has been on it the longest, and that beta tester who walked up to me at the event was telling me what happens when Bayo's work lands.

Share Cards: the design fork that almost went the wrong way

Share Cards has been Ola's project since close to day one, because Ola has been carrying the sharing ideology since the original version of Adtivity. He spent most of the weekend on it and it landed Monday, after a long stretch of testing on his personal X account where he was the only user pretending to be a real one.

The fork that almost went the wrong way was the design call. We were stuck between two ideas. The first was per-metric Share Cards, where the product looks at your numbers, picks the moment that matters, and generates the card for you. The second was a terminal version, where the founder picks the metric, picks the month, picks the framing, and assembles the card themselves. The terminal sounds powerful when you describe it, and it is the version we almost shipped. While voice-noting this piece I said out loud why we did not, which is that the terminal creates an extra job for the founder to do. Most founders will not do that job, because they did not show up to Adtivity to do a small graphic design task. The per-metric version is the one where the founder gets the card sitting there ready to share. That is the version that went live.

There was also a template incident. Ola built the first version of the Share Card design without the current brand template, which meant the first thing I saw looked like a Share Card from before our rebrand, which is a Share Card from a different company. I had to send him the template twice, and I had to rework the template itself to match the new brand setup before he could finish. We worked it out by Sunday. The card people post from Monday onwards is the one we actually wanted.

Why Share Cards are unlimited on Free

We made Share Cards unlimited on the Free tier on purpose. The instinct is to gate the share. To say you get three a month and then upgrade. We deliberately did not.

The job of a Share Card is to help a founder share something they have built. If we cap that, we are getting in the way of the thing we made the product for. Adtivity exists to help founders build something amazing and then share it, so throttling the share would be like a printer charging you per word of the email you are printing. Free is unlimited. You can post every milestone you hit, every month, every move, and the only Share Cards you do not get are the ones you decided not to make.

Same idea, split in half

Here is the part I am most quietly proud of this week. Pulse Alerts shipped without a sharing feature attached. Share Cards shipped without a notification layer. They went out two weeks apart, on two different arms of the product, built by two different people, and the second one made the first one make sense. That is not what we planned, that is what happened.

Pulse Alerts is the half of the loop that catches your attention. Share Cards is the half that lets you do something with it. The beta tester at the event was telling me he kept checking his Pulse Alerts because he could not stop looking. He could not turn that into a post until Monday. From Monday onwards he can.

We built them as separate arms on purpose, but we did not realise the proof of the integration would be how natural the second one felt the moment it landed. The Pulse Alert tells you something moved. The Share Card lets you tell everyone else.

What's next

All of this is the road toward the Founder Wall, which lands in a couple of weeks. Pulse Alerts is the part that catches what moves. Share Cards is the part that lets you post it. The Founder Wall is the part that keeps the receipt.

For now though we are just racing to ship and to see what gets better. Bayo will keep tuning the Pulse Alert intuition layer until it fires only when it should. Ola will keep watching what people actually share on the personal-X testing route, and adjusting the per-metric template until the cards feel like the founder made them. None of this is finished, and that is the part I keep telling people we are about. We are building the loop in public, with the team named, with the chaos visible, and with the next ship already in motion.