I Built "Wordle for Opinions" — Here's How 17 Psychology Tricks Keep Users Coming Back
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...
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