A few days ago I posted this:

Basically every person that ever messages me for a bit now gets profiled so I can improve how I can talk with them. 👀

The replies split neatly into two camps: "this is genius" and "this is deeply unsettling." Both reactions are fair. So here is the longer version: what I actually built, why I built it, and where I think the privacy line sits.

The itch

I talk to a lot of people. Founders, customers, friends, people who slide into my DMs with an idea. Over years, WhatsApp becomes this enormous, unsearchable pile of context. I would catch myself thinking: "what did this person and I actually talk about, and why does this thread feel slightly off?" The context was all there, in thousands of messages, just not in any shape I could use.

I did not want another CRM. CRMs are for deals. I wanted something quieter and more honest: a way to understand the people I talk to, and more importantly, a mirror for how I come across to them.

So I built one.

What it actually shows

Every contact gets a single page. No raw message log, no "here are 4,000 texts." Just a synthesised view, generated by an LLM that has read the history:

  • Who they are to me. A short "role" summary: how we know each other, what we tend to talk about, what this relationship is for. Plus the recurring topics.
  • How they communicate. Their style in plain language. Direct or hedging, fast or slow, warm or transactional.
  • How they probably perceive me. This is the uncomfortable, useful one. The model reads my side of the conversation and tells me how I likely land.

Then it gets visual.

The 8-axis radar

Each relationship gets a radar chart across eight traits:

Warmth, Directness, Reciprocity, Reliability, Self-orientation, Energy match, Vulnerability, Humor.

There are actually two radars per page: one for them, and one for me in this specific relationship. I do not behave the same way with everyone, and seeing my own shape change from contact to contact was the first genuinely surprising thing the tool gave me. With some people I am all directness and no warmth. With others, the reciprocity axis is badly lopsided, and not in my favor.

The trust signal

There is a calibrated trust signal on each page: a 0 to 5 score, a one-line summary, and a list of flags when something is worth noticing. It is deliberately conservative. It is not there to label anyone as good or bad. It is there to catch the patterns I would rationalise away on my own, like the contact who only ever messages when they need something.

The part that is actually the point: coaching

Everything above is diagnosis. The payoff is the self-coaching section: a few concrete, specific suggestions for how to show up better with this person. Not generic advice. Things like "you tend to close threads with them too abruptly, they read it as disinterest" or "you over-explain here, they respond better to one clear ask."

That is the whole reason this exists. Not to file people away. To talk to them better.

The privacy question, head on

Let me not dodge this, because the unsettled reactions deserve a real answer.

Yes, I am profiling people who did not ask to be profiled. That deserves more than a shrug, so here are the lines I drew:

  • It is single-user and private. One inbox: mine. One login: mine. Nobody else can see any of it, and it does not profile anyone I have not personally been in a conversation with.
  • The data never leaves my control. It is my own WhatsApp history, sitting on my own server. I am not buying data, scraping strangers, or enriching anyone from third-party sources.
  • It analyses the relationship, not the person. The output is explicitly framed around how we communicate and how I can do better. The most prominent section on every page is coaching aimed at me.
  • No raw-message voyeurism. The interface deliberately never shows the underlying messages next to the analysis. You get the synthesised view, not a surveillance feed of someone's texts.

Is it still a power asymmetry? Of course. Reading your own conversations with software that points out patterns you would rather not see is not a neutral act. My honest position: this is the same information I already have in my own head and my own chat history, made legible to me so I can be a better correspondent. The day it points outward at people I have not actually talked to, or gets shared with anyone but me, it becomes something else entirely. That is the line, and I am keeping it.

What surprised me

The tool mostly tells me things about myself. I expected a contacts encyclopedia and got a mirror. The radars in particular are humbling: my "self-orientation" axis is higher than I would like to admit in a few relationships I care about, and the coaching nudges have genuinely changed how I open and close conversations.

It turns out the interesting question was never "who is this person." It was "who am I, to this person." That is a much better thing to spend an afternoon building.

This is the kind of small, sharp, slightly-too-honest software I like to build at FlatNine. If you want to follow along, I post the builds (and the occasional unsettling tweet) @mikerubini.