Likely2: challenging us to appreciate each other more
The amount of gratitude we share — how much we appreciate good things in our lives — is the key to happiness.
Anecdotally, I know this to be true, but there’s also evidence out there. This 10-minute video from Kurzgesagt is a great explainer of the science we know so far.
Relatedly, one technique I love from my professional world as a software engineering leader is appreciations: taking the time to appreciate the good work that others have done. It helps teams feel happier and more coherent, and everyone leaves work feeling that they’ve been recognised for the hard work they do.
I’m a product innovator, and I have always wanted to build products that enable better human interaction. My first “real” product, name.pn, is all about the nuance of human communication and identity, and many of my other early-stage products in development have the same core mission.
I’m also someone who loves playing daily games. I don’t just play Wordle, I play more daily games than I have fingers on my hands.
One of my regular “shower thoughts” has been whether I could build a daily game of my own. I think perhaps I missed the boat on word games — there are hundreds and hundreds of variants of Wordle alone.
But I realised no one has yet tried to turn appreciating your friends, family and colleagues into a daily challenge, and I set about making this a reality!
Introducing: Likely2
Likely2 is a very simple web-based daily challenge. There’s nothing to install (although you can install it) and no account to create.
Every day, when you open Likely2, you will be asked to think of the first person who comes to mind when you think of today’s prompt. For example: as I publish this, the date is 21 July 2025, and the prompt is to think of someone who:
if they had an autobiography, you would read it
With some prompts, you’ll be able to think of someone right away, and some of them will have you digging deep in your contacts for someone you appreciate, but you don’t speak to all that often.
Filling in the name of your friend or contact and pressing the button will open the “Sharing” features of your phone with a pregenerated appreciation message which you can then send to them using whatever communication system you normally use with that person: text, WhatsApp, email, LinkedIn…
Doing this every day builds you up a streak so you can feel good about putting a bit of gratitude out into the world on a regular basis!
Don’t stop to read the rest of this blog post, go play today’s challenge!
What’s next for Likely2?
I’ve already seeded it with a hundred daily challenges, and I’ve tried to make them appropriate for as wide a range of people as I could imagine. (They do, of course, have an English-speaking-world bias to them because of the language in which they’re written.)
I’m very interested in feedback about how it’s going, what does and doesn’t work (especially if you have any accessibility issues!) and your ideas for future challenge prompts! I’ve created an email address feedback@likely2.com to collect your feedback.
Some things I’d love to add in the future include:
- An optional login system so you can save your streak and carry it from device to device
- Optional notifications to remind you to play every day
- Stats and achievements: for example, how many different people can you build a streak for before you have to appreciate the same person twice?
Whether I get the time to add these will largely depend on how successful it is, so please keep playing it and appreciating your friends!
Why is it called Likely2?
I can’t take credit for the name — that came from a brainstorming session with Dan, Emily and Lizzie. So thank you to all of you for the name!
American high school yearbooks contain a kind of appreciation called a “yearbook superlative” that usually starts with the words “Most likely to…”. Although this game is only asking you to think of the first person who meets the challenge, not necessarily the “most likely to”, we thought the name was a memorable fit!
The tech
Interested in what tech I used to build this? It’s built using Nuxt 4, which is an app-building framework based around Typescript and VueJS.
Unusually for a Quinn project, there’s no Rails in there at all (although there is a tiny bit of Ruby in the script that loads the challenges into the database!)
It’s deployed entirely onto Cloudflare — something I am new to using as a hosting platform. This means the web app itself can be distributed to your device from Cloudflare’s global CDN, but the API and the database are hosted on Cloudflare Workers and Cloudflare D1 too. Hopefully, this will mean it will be stable no matter how popular it gets!
Please spread the word!
I would love for Likely2 to be something that everyone is playing and everyone is talking about.
For that to happen, I’d love for everyone who is playing it and enjoying it to talk about it with their friends and share their thoughts about the day’s challenge.
And if you’re not enjoying it, please drop me a line to tell me why: feedback@likely2.com.
Now, go appreciate someone! https://likely2.com/