About madejustfor.me

My daughter has hard days sometimes. Not big-crisis hard days. Ordinary hard days where nothing landed right, and by dinner she's quiet and tired and small.

One night after a stretch of those, I made her a tiny thing. A little game on a webpage with her current favorite thing in it. I sent her the link and stood back.

It worked. Not in a "cured everything" way. In a small immediate way, which is what I had wanted.

I kept making them. Not for occasions. For no reason. And I noticed that the ones that landed hardest were the ones where I hadn't tried to be clever. Her name was in there. The specific thing she liked was in there. That was the entire trick.

The other side of it

Someone in my family is famously bad at buying presents. Not because they don't care. They care enormously. They're just the sort of person who realizes on the morning of a birthday that they haven't bought one yet.

I've watched this person love the kids in our family for years, and I've watched them feel bad about the last-minute part for years, and one night I realized: this could be for them too.

They wouldn't have made the game themselves. They wouldn't know what specific thing to put in it. But if there were a place they could go on their phone, and answer a handful of questions about the kid, and get back a link that had the kid's name and the kid's thing inside it, they'd use it.

So I made the place.

What madejustfor.me is

You go to the order form. You spend a couple of minutes telling us about the kid. Their name. How old they are. A few sentences about who they are and what they're into right now. What sort of setting feels right, what sort of mood. You sign it however you'd sign a card.

You pay nine dollars.

A minute or two later, a link. The link goes to a small playable card, made for that specific kid, with their name and their interests inside it. It runs on any phone or computer. It has music you can turn off. It has a share button.

There's no app. No account. No subscription. Nothing to remember later.

Who it's for

Two kinds of people, in my head.

The first is someone who loves a specific kid and can't, right now, be next to them. The uncle who adores his sister's kids and forgets. The aunt who wants to send something warm without knowing the current obsession. The grandparent who lives too far to drop by. The godparent. The divorced parent on the off week. The deployed parent. The parent traveling for work who won't be at the party.

The second is the kid on the receiving end. The one who notices. The one with a whole world in their head about a favorite animal or a favorite subject or a favorite anything. The kid who gets more from a small specific thing than from a big generic one.

If those two people are somewhere in your life, this thing is for them.

What it isn't

It isn't a kids' app. There's nothing to install.

It isn't a subscription. You pay once.

It isn't a big present. It's a small specific one. That's the whole idea.

The cards themselves aren't hand-made. I use an AI to read what you wrote and put together a game around it. I spent months writing the prompts, tuning the guardrails, and throwing away the cards that weren't good enough. If one comes back that isn't right, I want to know, and I'll make it right.

Specific moments this is good for

I wrote a few pages about the specific times people order these. If one of them matches yours, start there.

Or if you already know: