Deep Drifts

Deep Drifts helps you fall asleep with calm, curiosity-driven, science-backed essays that gently guide your mind away from worry — you might even learn something along the way.

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🌙 About Deep Drifts

Deep Drifts is a calm-reading app I designed to help people fall asleep by gently guiding busy minds away from daily stress. Each Drift is a short, curiosity-driven essay about something beautifully ordinary — screws, moss, honeycombs, or how trees communicate. The idea is inspired by the cognitive shuffle, a proven sleep technique that uses neutral, unrelated thoughts to break worry loops at bedtime.

✨ What inspired me

I’d noticed I often drifted off while reading non-fiction about things completely unrelated to my daily life — especially when the story wandered through details that were interesting, but never too exciting to keep me awake. Months ago, I started experimenting with ChatGPT to write these kinds of essays for myself at bedtime. When this hackathon was announced, I realized it was the perfect push to turn that personal sleep trick into a real product others could use too.

I’m an executive-level product designer and product manager who loves collaborating with engineers to bring ideas to life. Tools like Bolt.new unlocked a new passion for building things end-to-end — solo — in ways that just weren’t possible before.

🧠 What I learned

I dug into the science behind cognitive shuffling — how neutral mental imagery can help the brain switch from replaying the day to drifting toward sleep. On the technical side, I learned a lot about managing API authentication for both the web and mobile reading experience, especially to keep premium Drifts secure but accessible when needed. I also ran into real challenges handling larger story files, which taught me how to break content into more manageable pieces and deliver them cleanly through the backend.

I also learned how tricky it is to write stories that hold just enough attention to calm a restless mind, but not so much that they keep it busy. Finding that balance between narrative flow, factual detail, and a sleep-friendly tone has been its own quiet craft.

🔧 How I built it

I built Deep Drifts as a mobile app using React Native, supported by a custom backend powered by Supabase and hosted on Render. Drifts are stored in the backend and delivered via API to both the mobile app and the website. The reading experience is designed for dark mode, distraction-free, with soft typography that feels calm late at night. To make it sustainable, I created reusable AI prompts that help generate high-quality draft essays, always edited by me to keep the right tone and factual depth.

I have three separate Bolt.new projects for this app:

  1. Backend API: https://bolt.new/~/sb1-wgyz1mr5
  2. Mobile app: https://bolt.new/~/sb1-uk517a1h
  3. Web app: https://bolt.new/~/sb1-3pnahedc

⚡ Challenges I faced

One of the biggest challenges has been maintaining a consistent, soothing voice across every Drift. AI is a great drafting partner, but it takes careful prompting and rewriting to keep each essay gentle and accurate. Another challenge was finding the right delivery flow — Substack couldn’t support a true drip-style bedtime library, so I built my own custom flow for signups, access, and reading. And since the app isn’t live in the App Store yet, I’m using TestFlight to share it with real readers now.

Deep Drifts invites anyone to trade bedtime scrolling for calm curiosity — and to gently drift off to sleep, one quiet story at a time.

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