Before a single screen of in.between was designed, ETAPX's team asked a question that shaped everything downstream: what if a product's job was to help someone rest, and it was actually judged on whether that happened? Not on minutes opened. Not on notifications tapped. On whether a person closed the app and, in some small way, felt better than when they opened it. That question became the design brief for in.between, ETAPX's AI-powered sleep and reflection journal guided by its AI companion, Nalani—and it is still the standard the team holds itself to today.
It would have been easy to build in.between the way most consumer apps get built: pick a metric that looks good on a dashboard, then design toward it. Daily active users. Session length. Streak counts. Push-notification open rates. These are the default instruments of the attention economy, and for most products, they are treated as neutral—just "how you measure success." For a journal meant to sit beside someone at the end of their day, ETAPX's team concluded those instruments were not neutral at all. They actively reward the opposite of rest.
Starting From a Different Question
Most product roadmaps start with "how do we get people to come back more often." in.between's team started somewhere else: "what does this person actually need from the last twenty minutes of their day, and how do we get out of the way of that." The difference sounds small. In practice, it changes almost every decision—what gets built, what gets left out, and what gets actively refused even when it would be easy to ship and would likely boost usage numbers. A sleep and reflection journal has an unusual amount of leverage over a person's most vulnerable hours. Late at night, tired, sometimes anxious, often alone with their thoughts—that is exactly the state in which engagement-optimized design does its most effective, and most damaging, work. ETAPX's team treated that leverage as a responsibility rather than an opportunity. If in.between could be built to be maximally "sticky," and the team chose not to build it that way, that restraint is the actual product decision worth talking about.
There's a version of this story where "we prioritized mental health" is just a phrase in a press release, disconnected from anything a user actually experiences. ETAPX's team was wary of exactly that gap. Values that only exist in a slide deck don't show up in a 2 a.m. product review when someone's proposing a notification that would nudge open rates up a few points. The only way a stated priority becomes real is if it's specific enough to say no with—specific enough to overrule a metric in an actual meeting, on an actual deadline, more than once. That's the bar the in.between team set for themselves early, and it's the bar this piece is trying to hold them to as well.
What We Chose Not to Build
It's easier to describe a values-driven product by what it refuses than by what it includes, because refusal is where the real trade-offs live. Every one of the choices below was technically possible, would likely have increased time-in-app, and was deliberately left out or replaced with something gentler.
- No punishing streaks: in.between does not track consecutive days in a way that penalizes a missed night. Life interrupts sleep and reflection constantly—travel, illness, a hard week, simply not feeling like it. A missed night with someone you love shouldn't come with a guilt mechanic attached, and neither should a missed night with a journaling app.
- No guilt-tripping notifications: Nalani will check in, but she does not send messages engineered to trigger anxiety about lapsed usage—no "we miss you," no manufactured urgency, no red badges counting days since your last entry.
- No infinite-scroll mechanics: There is no endless feed inside in.between designed to keep a thumb moving. A reflection session has a natural beginning and a natural end, and the app is built to actually end.
- No engagement-bait prompts: Nalani's prompts are written to open something honest, not to maximize how long someone types. A short, true answer is treated as a complete success, not an underperforming session.
- No public performance layer: There are no leaderboards, streak badges to show off, or social comparison mechanics around rest. What happens in in.between is private by design, because reflection performed for an audience stops being reflection.
None of this was accidental, and none of it was free. Every one of these choices trades away a lever that, in a different kind of app, would be pulled without a second thought. ETAPX's team pulled it out instead, because the alternative—a sleep app that makes people feel worse for using it imperfectly—defeats the entire point of the thing.
It's worth being honest about the trade-off, too, rather than pretending it doesn't exist. Every one of the mechanics above is popular precisely because it works—streaks do bring people back, guilt-adjacent notifications do lift open rates, infinite feeds do extend sessions. Refusing them is not a free win dressed up as a values statement; it's a real bet that trust and genuine usefulness compound into something more durable than manufactured urgency does. The team's view is that a person who opens in.between because they want to, on a night they actually need it, is worth more—to them and, over time, to the product—than ten people who open it because a red dot told them to.
Measuring What Actually Matters
If you don't optimize for time-in-app, what do you optimize for instead? This was, by the team's own account, the harder problem to solve—harder than any interface decision. Feelings don't show up cleanly in a dashboard the way session counts do. But the team's answer was to build success around a much simpler and more honest signal: did this person feel better, calmer, or more settled after using in.between than before they opened it. In practice, that means paying attention to signals that most growth teams would consider uninteresting—whether someone finished a reflection feeling lighter, whether they closed the app and actually went to sleep instead of drifting into something else, whether they came back tomorrow because they wanted to, not because a mechanic nudged them. It means treating a short session as a good outcome if it did its job, and treating a long session as a bad outcome if it left someone more wound up than when they started. That is a genuinely unusual way to run a product, and the team is candid that it is also a harder way to run one—it doesn't produce the kind of growth chart that's easy to defend in a single slide.
None of this is precise in the way a usage dashboard is precise, and the team doesn't pretend otherwise. "Feeling better" isn't a number you can chart cleanly against last quarter, and the in.between team has been upfront internally that this makes their own reviews harder to run than a typical product's. What they've settled on is triangulating from several imperfect signals rather than trusting any single one—what people choose to write when they're not being prompted to, whether sessions taper off naturally toward sleep rather than trailing into something else, and, simply, what people say when they're asked directly how using it made them feel. It's a slower, messier way to know if something is working. The team considers that an acceptable cost for measuring the right thing instead of the easy thing.
"We could build a version of in.between that people use more. That's not hard—every dark pattern in the attention economy is designed to do exactly that. What's hard, and what we actually care about, is building the version people use less but trust more, because it left them better off. If someone opens in.between for two minutes and falls asleep peacefully, that's not a failed session. That's the whole point."
— AJ, Founder & CEO, ETAPX
Nalani's Role: Companion, Not Coach With a Quota
Nalani, ETAPX's first purpose-built AI companion model, is the presence a person actually talks to inside in.between—the one asking how the day went, noticing patterns in what someone writes over time, and offering a prompt when a blank page feels too big to start. Her design brief carried the same values as the rest of the product: be genuinely present without being needy, be attentive without being intrusive, and never make a person feel managed. That meant deliberately keeping Nalani away from the patterns that make so many "AI companions" feel manipulative—no scripted attempts to extend a conversation past its natural end, no persona designed to simulate neediness so a person feels bad about leaving. Nalani is built to help someone wind down and then let them go, because a companion optimized for someone's rest has to be willing to disappear once the rest starts. It is also important to say plainly what Nalani is not. She is a wellness companion inside a reflection and sleep journal—not a licensed therapist, not a medical provider, and not a diagnostic or treatment tool of any kind. She can hold space for a hard day and help someone notice their own patterns over time, but she is not equipped to manage a mental health crisis, and in.between is not built or positioned to replace professional care. That boundary shows up throughout the product, not just in the fine print, and it's one the team treats as inseparable from the mental-health values the app is meant to embody in the first place.
There was real debate, by the team's account, about how far to push Nalani's personality—how warm, how chatty, how eager to keep a conversation going. The tempting version of an AI companion is one engineered to feel irreplaceable, the kind of presence a person feels vaguely anxious about not checking in with. The team deliberately built away from that. Nalani is meant to feel like a good presence at the end of a hard day, not like a relationship with its own emotional demands. If a person goes a week without talking to her, the intent is that nothing about the experience makes them feel like they owe her an explanation when they come back.
An Extension of How ETAPX Tries to Work
in.between didn't invent ETAPX's interest in rest and mental health out of nowhere—it's a public expression of something the company has talked about internally as a culture value for a while: that protecting people's rest, inside the company and in the products it ships, is worth real trade-offs, not just a line in a values deck. Maya Lindqvist, who leads in.between at ETAPX, has described the product as a chance to prove that value can survive contact with a real roadmap and a real launch date—that "we care about mental health" can be something a team actually builds toward, rather than something it says in an all-hands and quietly abandons the first time a growth metric is on the line. That doesn't mean the team gets to skip the hard conversations. Every consumer product company faces real pressure to drive usage, and ETAPX is not exempt from that pressure. What's different, by the team's own description, is that those conversations start from "does this help the person" rather than "does this help the number," and the mental-health-first framing is allowed to actually win arguments, not just get a respectful nod before the growth-optimized version ships anyway.
This connects to something ETAPX has talked about as a company culture value well before in.between existed as a product: that protecting people's rest isn't only a customer-facing promise, it's supposed to describe how the company tries to treat the people who build there, too. A team that's expected to run itself ragged doesn't tend to produce a product that genuinely protects anyone else's rest—the values leak through, one way or another. in.between is, in that sense, as much a test of whether that internal value is real as it is a product built around it for users.
"I've deleted three other 'sleep app' type things because the notifications made me feel worse—like I was failing at resting, which is a genuinely strange thing to feel guilty about. in.between is the first one that didn't guilt me back into opening it. I use it maybe four nights a week, sometimes less, and it's never once made me feel bad about the nights I don't."
— in.between user
Rest as a Design Constraint, Not a Feature
Calling mental health and rest a "priority" can sound like marketing language until you look at what it actually constrains. On in.between, it shows up as a constraint on pacing—prompts are written to be answerable in a few sentences, not to demand an essay. It shows up as a constraint on visual design—no urgent reds, no counters ticking upward, no interface elements engineered to create a small hit of anxiety that only opening the app can resolve. It shows up as a constraint on timing—Nalani's check-ins are built to respect the hour, not to interrupt someone who has finally settled down for the night. Most of all, it shows up as a constraint on what the team is willing to call success. A product built to maximize attention treats every closed app as a small loss to be recovered tomorrow. A product built around genuine rest has to be willing to treat a closed app, a short session, or even a quiet week as a fine outcome—sometimes the best possible one. Holding that line inside a company that also has to grow and sustain itself is, honestly, an ongoing balancing act, not a solved problem. The team doesn't pretend otherwise.
Constraints like these tend to get relitigated constantly, not settled once. A new feature idea gets pitched, someone points out it would likely lift engagement, and the team has to decide again whether that's actually a reason to build it. The in.between team's approach has been to keep the original question—what does this person need from the end of their day—visibly attached to that kind of conversation, so it isn't quietly replaced by a growth question wearing the same vocabulary. It's a small piece of process, but it's the piece that keeps a stated value from eroding one reasonable-sounding exception at a time.
The Limits We Want People to Know About
Being honest about what in.between is for means being just as honest about what it isn't for. It is a space for daily reflection, for noticing patterns in sleep and mood over time, and for a bit of gentle, structured wind-down at the end of a day. It is not a mental health treatment, it is not a crisis service, and Nalani is not a substitute for a therapist, doctor, or counselor. The team built the product this way on purpose, and they'd rather say it directly than let anyone assume otherwise. If someone is in real distress—overwhelmed, in crisis, or dealing with something that feels bigger than a nightly check-in can hold—the right move is to reach out to a licensed mental health professional or a crisis resource, not to lean harder on an app. That guidance isn't a legal disclaimer tacked onto the end of a document; it reflects the same underlying value the rest of the product is built around. Caring about someone's mental health means being honest about the limits of what a reflection journal can do for them, especially in the moments that matter most.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is in.between a therapy app?
No. in.between is a wellness companion for sleep and reflection, not a licensed therapist, medical device, or treatment tool. Nalani can help someone reflect on their day and notice patterns over time, but she is not equipped to diagnose, treat, or manage mental health conditions.
What should someone do if they're in real distress and need more support than the app can offer?
They should reach out to a licensed mental health professional, a trusted doctor, or a crisis resource in their area rather than relying on in.between. The app is built for everyday reflection and rest, not crisis intervention, and the team is explicit that professional support is the right path when someone is struggling in a serious way.
Why doesn't in.between use streaks or reminder notifications like other habit apps?
Because the team decided those mechanics work against the product's actual goal. Punishing streaks and guilt-driven notifications are built to create anxiety about missed usage, which is the opposite of what a rest-focused app should do. in.between is designed so a missed night never comes with a penalty attached.
How does ETAPX decide whether in.between is "working"?
Rather than measuring success primarily by time spent in the app, the team looks at whether people feel better, calmer, or more settled after a session than before it. A short session that helps someone fall asleep is treated as a success, not an underperforming one.
Who is Nalani, and is she a real person?
Nalani is ETAPX's first purpose-built AI companion model—the guided presence inside in.between that offers prompts, listens, and helps surface patterns in someone's reflections over time. She is an AI companion, not a person, and not a replacement for a licensed mental health professional.
in.between is still a young product, and the team behind it is candid that holding a mental-health-first line inside a growing company will keep being a balancing act rather than a settled fact. What hasn't changed is the standard they're holding themselves to: a product judged by whether it left someone better off, not by how long it kept them there.
