About Squiggle

I’m Raymond. I built Squiggle for my own kids — Roxanne, four, and her little brother Rendell.

Roxanne loves to draw, write, and spell on paper. She’ll happily disappear into a stack of A4 sheets for an hour, copying a bus or trying to write her own name. What she does not love is the kind of iPad app most parents around me seem to end up handing their kids: autoplay YouTube videos with loud imagery, silly free-to-play games designed to keep egging her on, endless “tap-here-for-a-prize” loops. The default kids’ iPad experience is mindless consumption with a thin learning veneer. That’s not what I wanted in my daughter’s hands.

So one afternoon, in a gap between two investor calls for my other company, I sat down to see if I could build the app I actually wanted her to use.

The same as paper.

Calm. Quiet. Open-ended. Nothing jumping out at her. No one to chat with. No score to chase. No “come back tomorrow!” The crayon-on-paper aesthetic isn’t a stylistic flourish — it’s the brief.

The closest framework I can point to is Montessori: a clean workspace, age-appropriate materials, freedom to explore, and the right to be bored. Squiggle is built around that idea. The library gives her reference pictures she can copy. The “anything!” canvas lets her draw whatever she invented in her own head. Either is fine. Both is better.

I’m a creator by nature — apps, companies, even 3D-printed things on the dining table. I think being creative and being daring will matter more than ever in the AI age. I’d rather my kids learn to make something and practice it than learn to scroll through what someone else made.

The thing I didn’t expect was how the four parts of the app would feed each other.

A kid picks “dog.” She draws a dog. She spells dog. She writes dog. A week later she’s still drawing dogs — but now she can write the word from memory. Then one day she opens the “anything!” canvas and decides to draw her friend Hadid. She asks me how to spell Hadid. The next day she can write Hadid on her own.

That cycle — draw → spell → write → make it your own — is the whole app.

The absences matter as much as the features:

• No ads. None, ever.
• No third-party trackers, analytics SDKs, or attribution tools.
• No accounts, no email signup, no friends list, no chat, no comments.
• No leaderboards, no points, no streaks, no daily-engagement mechanics.
• No notifications outside the app.
• No AI-generated images in v1. We considered it; it’s not ready to be safe for a four-year-old, and the curated library fits the brief better.
• No “watch a video to unlock” anything.

The first version of Squiggle is small on purpose. What is there is tuned by age (3 to 6) — sketch complexity, tracing strictness, draw modes — so a three-year-old and a six-year-old get the version of Squiggle that fits them.

If there is one app a parent feels comfortable handing to their kid alone, I want it to be Squiggle.

I’m building this for my own daughter and son. I would never put anything in front of them that I wouldn’t put in front of yours. That commitment doesn’t flex when business pressure shows up — no future ads, no quietly flipping on user tracking, no “watch-this-to-unlock” gimmicks. If any of that ever happens, you have this paragraph to point at.

Right now, just me — Raymond. I’m a founder and engineer by trade (also the CEO of another company), and Squiggle is what I build in the quiet hours when my own kids are asleep.

I am not a designer. The warm paper aesthetic is borrowed from real crayons and my daughter’s crayon-on-paper drawings. If it grows beyond me one day, it will grow slowly and carefully — the way I’d want a kids’ app I trusted to grow.

— Raymond