Knowyuu

KnowYuu makes getting to know your partner a game: answer playful questions, guess each other's responses, and turn surprising reveals into real conversations.

Comment

Inspiration

Couples can care deeply about each other and still fall into familiar routines. Over time, there are fewer new questions to ask, fewer unexpected answers, and plenty of things about each other that simply never come up in everyday conversation.

That inspired KnowYuu — a couples game built around curiosity.

We wanted to create a reason to ask a new question, laugh at an unexpected answer, discover a preference you somehow never knew, or start a conversation you might not otherwise have had.

KnowYuu turns those moments into interactive games couples can return to, whether they have five minutes for something playful or want to have a deeper conversation.

What it does

KnowYuu brings different kinds of couples games into one shared experience.

Partners connect their accounts, choose a game and topic, and play together through answers, guesses, comparisons, challenges, and reveals.

KnowYuu currently includes:

  • This or That — compare preferences and discover where you match.
  • Deep Questions — explore more meaningful topics together.
  • Red Flag or Green Flag? — independently judge relationship scenarios and compare perspectives.
  • How Well Do You Know Me? — answer about yourself, then see how accurately your partner can guess your answers.
  • Would You Rather — compare choices through playful dilemmas.
  • Love Language Quiz — explore preferences around affection, support, intimacy, and connection.
  • Daily Challenge — a lightweight shared ritual couples can return to each day.

Games are organized into topics, and experiences such as Topic Roulette turn choosing what to explore into part of the game itself.

KnowYuu doesn't try to grade a relationship as good or bad. There is no compatibility verdict at the end.

The results simply give two people something new to discover and talk about together.

How we built it

The first version of KnowYuu was built in Replit, which helped us move quickly from the original product idea to a working two-person experience.

As KnowYuu grew, development moved into a local pnpm workspace, with the mobile app built using React Native, Expo, and TypeScript for iOS and Android.

An Express API and PostgreSQL database power the backend, managing partner connections, question pools, game sessions, answers, guesses, progress, and results.

One of the most important architectural decisions was treating the couple rather than an individual player as the center of the game experience.

Two people can progress at different times. One partner might finish answering while the other is still playing, leave the app, and return later. The game state therefore needs to understand both players and move them through answering, waiting, guessing, revealing, results, and unfinished sessions without losing their progress.

For monetization, we integrated RevenueCat to manage subscriptions and premium access. KnowYuu Pro includes Individual and Couple coverage, with Couple Pro designed around the fact that the value of KnowYuu comes from two connected people playing together.

KnowYuu's supporting production services are deployed using Coolify and Cloudflare.

Challenges we ran into

The hardest challenge was making a two-person game feel simple.

Most mobile experiences only need to understand what one user is doing. KnowYuu needs to understand where both partners are in an experience.

One person may be answering while the other has finished. A player may be waiting for their partner, guessing an answer their partner submitted earlier, returning to an unfinished round, or waiting for both sides to complete before something can be revealed.

We spent a lot of time designing clear answer, guess, waiting, reveal, result, and resume states so that the underlying synchronization doesn't make the game itself feel complicated.

Cross-platform authentication brought another set of challenges, particularly making sign-in behave consistently across mobile platforms.

We also worked through subscription purchases, entitlement state, and Restore Purchases while integrating RevenueCat into the production experience.

Another major challenge wasn't infrastructure at all: content.

A couples game lives or dies by its questions. With multiple games and topics, we needed large, structured question pools that still felt varied. We worked carefully to avoid repetition while keeping questions playful, inclusive, relevant to their game, and useful for couples with different personalities and relationship experiences.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud that KnowYuu has become a cohesive product rather than simply a collection of questions.

It now combines multiple game mechanics, connected partner accounts, shared sessions, Topic Roulette, private answers, guessing, reveals, results, Daily Challenges, structured question libraries, and optional Pro access within one couples experience.

We're particularly proud of the interaction between the two players. Answers can remain private until the right moment, partners can progress independently, and the eventual reveal turns data stored by the app into something much more important: a moment between two people.

We're also proud that KnowYuu was built as a real product beyond the hackathon. It has production infrastructure, a scalable content system, mobile releases, and RevenueCat-powered monetization designed to support continued development.

What we learned

The biggest lesson was that designing for a pair is fundamentally different from designing for one user.

The pauses between players matter just as much as the moments when they're actively playing together. Waiting needs to feel intentional. Privacy needs to be clear. Reveals need anticipation. And both people need to understand what is happening without seeing information they shouldn't see yet.

We also learned that engagement doesn't always mean maximizing screen time.

A KnowYuu session can be worthwhile even if it lasts only five minutes, as long as it leaves two people laughing about an answer, discovering something unexpected, or continuing a conversation after they put their phones down.

On the business side, integrating RevenueCat showed us how much complexity exists behind a seemingly simple premium subscription. Centralizing subscription and entitlement management lets us focus more of our effort on the actual experiences couples are subscribing to.

What's next for KnowYuu

We're continuing to expand KnowYuu with larger question libraries, new games and topics, improved Daily Challenges, and refinements based on player feedback.

We're also exploring better personalization: helping couples discover games and topics that fit what they enjoy without removing the surprise that makes playing together interesting.

As the content library grows, KnowYuu Pro gives us a sustainable way to continue adding new experiences while keeping the core product accessible.

The long-term goal isn't to tell couples how compatible they are.

It's much simpler:

Keep giving two people new reasons to discover each other.

Built With

Share this project:

Updates

Submission history