Clutch Private beta
An attention-management app for iPhone. Clutch blocks the apps and sites that derail you, and when you reach for one anyway, an AI coach called Lumi asks what you're actually doing. Goals close with proof, not a checkbox.
Independent software studio
Software for people trying to hold their ground.
Conatus builds a small number of apps around one idea: the hardest part of doing what you meant to do isn't knowing what it is — it's the ten seconds where you decide not to.
We work on those ten seconds. Carefully, on Apple platforms, one product at a time.
Work
Two apps, one problem.
Both of them put something in the way at the moment you're most likely to fold — and then talk to you about it.
Nudged In development
An alarm you have to argue with. You write down the night before why you need to be up; in the morning Lumi throws it back at you, and the only way to stop the noise is a live photo proving you're actually on your feet.
Approach
How we build.
01
Say what the thing can't do
No app can lock you out of your own phone, and pretending otherwise is how this category lost people's trust. We put the limitations on the marketing page, not in the small print.
02
Friction beats willpower
Nobody scrolls for two hours because they lack character. They do it because it took one tap. We design for the moment of the tap — slow it down, make it visible, make it a decision again.
03
The product should work unpaid
Blocking is free in Clutch and always will be. A subscription should buy a better coach, never a functioning app. Nobody's attention should be held hostage to a card on file.
Contact
Say hello.
Beta access, press, partnerships, or a bug that's driving you up the wall — same inbox, and a real person reads it.
conatus — in Spinoza, the effort by which each thing strives to persevere in its own being. We liked that the word is about effort rather than outcome.