Every day, four times a day, a notification tells me a new topic just unlocked, and I open my phone to drag a slider from 0 to 100 on something like “is a hot dog a sandwich” or “should tipping be mandatory.” I built the app that asks these questions. It’s called Gauge, a free iOS daily opinion polling app I’ve been calling “Wordle for Opinions,” and I built the whole thing solo as my entry for Shipaton 2026.

It’s currently in TestFlight beta here. In this article, I want to walk through the idea, the psychology I baked into it, and the technical and business tradeoffs of building it alone.

The idea

Polling apps have existed forever, and so have “hot take” social features bolted onto bigger platforms. But nobody had built a habit product around opinions the way Wordle built one around vocabulary. Wordle worked because it was small, finite, and shareable: one puzzle, once a day, then gone. Twitter polls and Instagram question stickers give you unlimited noise, with no ritual, no scarcity, and no shared moment.

Gauge borrows Wordle’s scarcity mechanic and applies it to opinions instead of words. Four topics unlock at fixed times: morning, midday, afternoon, and evening. You can’t binge through a week of takes in five minutes. You show up four times a day, drag a slider from 0 to 100 on a topic, and instantly see how thousands of other people answered. That’s the entire loop, and it fills a gap that generic polling never addressed: structure, scarcity, and a shared daily moment.

Psychology deep dive

I built 17 distinct psychological hooks into Gauge, more than I originally planned, because once a few of them started changing my own behavior during testing, I kept adding more. Five are worth explaining in detail.

The first is the curiosity gap. The slider doesn’t reveal the crowd’s answer until after you commit to your own position. That single ordering decision, vote first, reveal after, does most of the retention work in the app. An unanswered question creates a small, nagging tension your brain wants resolved, and delaying the reveal by even a few seconds makes people open the app just to close that loop.

The second is streak loss aversion, the same mechanic that makes Duolingo and Wordle sticky. Missing a day doesn’t just reset a counter, it triggers the same sting as losing something you already own, which is a stronger motivator than the promise of gaining something new. I kept the streak visible on the home screen at all times, not buried in a stats tab, because loss aversion only works if the thing you might lose stays in view.

The third is what I call the opinion mirror. After voting, you don’t just see the crowd average, you see how your answer compares to people who share your other voting patterns, a lightweight “people like you” reflection. It taps into a basic drive to understand your own identity relative to a group, turning a single vote into a small piece of self-discovery instead of a throwaway tap.

The fourth is voting tribes, an optional layer that clusters your voting history with other users who tend to answer similarly. This leans on in-group bias: once you know you’re statistically “team X” on some axis, you’re more curious whether team X agrees with you on the next topic too, which pulls you back for the next unlock.

The fifth is mystery rewards, unpredictable unlocks like a badge, an early look at a stat, or a rare topic, delivered on an irregular schedule instead of a fixed one. Variable-ratio reinforcement is the same mechanism behind slot machines, and while I kept it strictly cosmetic rather than pay-to-win, unpredictability is simply a stronger hook than a predictable reward calendar.

Tech stack decisions

Gauge is built entirely solo in SwiftUI, targeting iOS 18+. That version floor was a deliberate tradeoff: I lost access to a slice of older devices, but gained newer animation and widget APIs that make the slider feel physical rather than mechanical, and as a one-person team I couldn’t afford to hand-roll compatibility shims for three OS versions back.

The backend is Supabase. I didn’t want to run and patch my own Postgres instance, and Supabase gave me row-level security, realtime vote aggregation, and auth out of the box, so I could spend my limited hours on the client experience instead of backend plumbing. StoreKit 2 handles the Pro subscription with its modern async/await APIs, cutting a huge amount of boilerplate compared to the original StoreKit. WidgetKit powers a home-screen widget that shows the current topic without opening the app, which turned out to be one of the highest-leverage features for reminding people a new topic had unlocked.

The honest tradeoff of building solo is scope discipline. Every feature I added was one I had to design, build, test, and maintain myself, so I cut aggressively: no custom server infrastructure beyond what Supabase gives for free, no backend admin panel, and no Android version yet.

Monetization strategy

Gauge is free to use, with a Pro tier that unlocks deeper insights and full historical vote data rather than gating the core loop. Free users get the daily vote, the instant crowd result, and a taste of comparison. Pro unlocks the full “You vs Avg” history over time, deeper breakdowns of how your votes trend, and expanded access to past topics.

The bigger growth hack is that every TestFlight beta tester gets lifetime Pro for free. That’s not just generosity, it’s an acquisition and feedback strategy: beta testers become the most invested users in the app because they’re getting a permanent perk, which makes them far more likely to actually vote daily, report bugs, and tell friends, rather than installing once and disappearing.

What’s next

The next milestone is the full App Store launch, moving out of TestFlight and into public availability. After that, the roadmap is mostly about the community layer: more granular voting tribes, a public leaderboard for prediction accuracy, and new topic categories based on what beta testers actually engage with.

If you want to follow along or try it yourself, the beta is open now on TestFlight, the app’s home base is at gaugeapps.com, and I’m tracking the whole build for Shipaton 2026 on DevPost and HackerNoon.

If you’ve ever wanted to know whether a hot dog is a sandwich according to a few thousand strangers, now you can find out, once a day, four times a day.