DryRun

Conversations can be difficult, you know what to say, you practice it but when its time, it is totally different. A response can leave you confused or nervous. Practice them on a real call, use DryRun

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Inspiration

Conversations aren't that difficult like we make it up in our head. Most of the time we know what needs to be said but we still get nervous, mess up words and forgot important points. We end up missing things we deserve or it reduces our confidence. DryRun is made to fix that and help build your conversational skills with real conversations which mimic a real call.

Lets take a real scenario, Six months ago, Maya was the person you complained to. Now she reports to you, her last two deliverables were late, and you have to tell her. You already know what to say. You've said it in the shower, on the drive in, at two in the morning. What you haven't done is say it to someone who looks back at you and says, "Honestly? This feels kind of weird." That gap is what DryRun is for. Heather's audience is full of new managers standing in exactly this spot, promoted over their friends and handed conversations nobody trained them for. Advice won't close that gap. Practice will.

What it does

You tell DryRun what you're walking into: who the other person is, what's at stake, the moment you usually mess up. It takes about two minutes, and you can talk instead of type.

Then you have the conversation. It's a live video call with a realistic personality, and a voice that can interrupt you, gets defensive, and leans on the friendship when it's losing. There's no script and nothing to pick from a list. You say it the way you'd say it. Its as real as a call can get.

When you hang up, you get a score out of 100 across six things: how direct you were, how clear, how confident, how steady, whether you held your ground, and whether you listened. Each one comes with a line quoting what you actually said. Underneath is a paragraph written by the other person, about what they needed to hear from you. It's my favourite part of the app.

Then you run it again.

It works just as well outside management. Asking for a raise, handing in your notice, saying no to your boss, a final-round interview where the interviewer pulls your CV up on screen and asks which part of that project was really you.

How I built it

I built DryRun alone. The app is SwiftUI. The backend is on Cloudflare Workers and containers that handles sign-in, sessions, transcripts, scores, and the minutes each plan includes.

Every scenario is written for the person using it. Their onboarding answers become a character, an objection they haven't answered yet, and a short description of what handling this particular conversation well would look like. The scorer grades the transcript against that description. The six scores are averaged in code, not by the model, so the same conversation always gets the same number and progress actually means something.

Subscriptions run through RevenueCat.

Challenges I ran into

The hardest part was making the other side feel like a person and making the score mean something. Feedback was the second. "Be more confident" is so at all helpful, so every note has to quote you, and the other person's paragraph describes what would have convinced them without handing you a script to follow, it helps you improve naturally and build up confidence.

What's next

Improving the scoring, checking eye contact, tonality and much more, scoring needs more work and fine tuning.

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