# Diego Dotta (diego.horse) > Personal blog of Diego Dotta since 1999: 277 published posts on building self-funded apps in public, AI for mental health, digital democracy, games, travel and sustainability. **Diego Dotta** (full name Diego Fernando Dotta Couto) is an entrepreneur in the San Francisco Bay Area, behind [Smart Keys](https://www.smartkeys.so), [The Sunrise](https://thesunrise.org/) and its viral alarm [Bird Rise](https://diego.horse/the-social-fall-the-bird-rise/). His approach, which he calls [riding horses, not unicorns](https://diego.horse/horses-break-even-unicorns-break-hearts/), is to build small self-funded apps that pay for themselves and publish the real numbers. Before going indie he co-founded [Youper](https://diego.horse/tag/youper/), an AI mental health app the company says has been used by more than 3 million people, and co-authored four peer-reviewed studies on digital mental health. He also builds civic tech prototypes about [digital democracy](https://diego.horse/tag/democracy/), sits on the board of [Sustainable Walnut Creek](https://www.sustainablewalnutcreek.org/about/), and has kept this blog since [1999](https://diego.horse/php-echo-hello-world/). All content here is public and written by Diego. Please link back if you quote it. Last updated: 2026-10-30 (most recent post). This file is regenerated on every build. ## About - [About](https://diego.horse/about/): biography, research papers, patent and press, with schema.org Person data - [Now](https://diego.horse/now/): what Diego is doing this month - [Build log](https://diego.horse/build-log/): every project he has built, most of them failures, with the reasons - [Open goals](https://diego.horse/open-goals/): this year's goals and how they're going ## Topics - [Food for thought](https://diego.horse/tag/food-for-thought/): 63 posts - [Travel](https://diego.horse/tag/travel/): 61 posts - [Poetry](https://diego.horse/tag/poetry/): 36 posts - [Techy](https://diego.horse/tag/techy/): 31 posts - [Books](https://diego.horse/tag/books/): 28 posts - [Ranting](https://diego.horse/tag/ranting/): 27 posts - [Sustainability](https://diego.horse/tag/sustainability/): 27 posts - [Quotes](https://diego.horse/tag/quotes/): 25 posts - [Building in Public](https://diego.horse/tag/building-in-public/): 24 posts - [Youper](https://diego.horse/tag/youper/): 18 posts - [Funny](https://diego.horse/tag/funny/): 15 posts - [Mind](https://diego.horse/tag/mind/): 15 posts - [Productivity](https://diego.horse/tag/productivity/): 14 posts - [Bragging](https://diego.horse/tag/bragging/): 12 posts - [Kombi](https://diego.horse/tag/kombi/): 12 posts - [Movies](https://diego.horse/tag/movies/): 12 posts - [Cycling](https://diego.horse/tag/cycling/): 11 posts - [Photography](https://diego.horse/tag/photography/): 9 posts - [Garden](https://diego.horse/tag/garden/): 8 posts - [Smart Keys](https://diego.horse/tag/smart-keys/): 8 posts - [Democracy](https://diego.horse/tag/democracy/): 7 posts - [Love](https://diego.horse/tag/love/): 7 posts - [QML](https://diego.horse/tag/qml/): 7 posts - [Interviews](https://diego.horse/tag/interviews/): 6 posts - [Games](https://diego.horse/tag/games/): 5 posts - [Alarms](https://diego.horse/tag/alarms/): 1 posts ## Recent posts - [Right, then left](https://diego.horse/right-then-left/) (2026-10-26): The e-Título app checked my face and my GPS to excuse me from voting in Brazil's runoff, but it couldn't let me vote. More than 30 million Brazilians didn't vote either, in a race decided by 4 million. So, I looked into how Estonia votes online and naively built a prototype for voting on the plan instead of the person. - [Haiku and Haibun](https://diego.horse/haiku-haibun/) (2026-10-19): I asked a few folks who actually know what they’re doing with writing, and one of them told me my writing looks a bit like haibun (a Japanese form that mixes short prose with haiku, made famous by Bashō’s travel journals). I was so excited about that diagnosis (a diagnosis??? Like it’s a condition), especially… - [Peep Watch](https://diego.horse/peep-watch/) (2026-10-13): Rewritten on Oct 16 after feedback from the writers’ meetup in Louisville. One of them had to read a few sentences twice, fair enough. Thanks to Mallory, Tom, Mike, John, Darrel, Felipe, and Leandra. The guy in the seat in front of me holds his phone up high, at eye level, which is very generous… - [The King Is a Fraud](https://diego.horse/the-king-is-a-fraud/) (2026-10-02): In 2011 I ran a tiny blog called QuicKing, the Kingdom of QML Workaround. Six posts in, the kingdom fell, and the code had nothing to do with it. - [Cloudflare Built EmDash. I Built NeighDash.](https://diego.horse/cloudflare-built-emdash-i-built-neighdash/) (2026-09-29): I moved eight websites off a shared server that kept falling over and onto Cloudflare, with an AI agent doing the heavy lifting. Cloudflare moved its own blog the same month, with load tests, a gradual rollout and a CMS named after my least favorite punctuation mark. So I named mine after a horse. - [The NYT Is (Also) a Games Company](https://diego.horse/the-nyt-is-also-a-games-company/) (2026-06-12): I shipped a silly game to sell a keyboard, hit #4 on Product Hunt, and came away convinced the Times took this hundred-year-old playbook to another level. I just shipped a game called QWERTYS. It’s Tetris with a twist: the board is your keyboard, and pieces made of letters fall over the same keys you… - [The Early Bird Caught Me](https://diego.horse/the-early-bird-caught-me/) (2026-06-01): A bird alarm I never bet on quietly beat every idea I loved, and figuring out why meant admitting I’d been reading my numbers backwards for years. I build things for fun, and to fix my own problems. That’s pretty much the whole business plan. There are no VCs involved anymore and no growth team… - [Smart Keys, Idea to Profit](https://diego.horse/smart-keys-idea-to-profit/) (2026-02-10): This is a summary of a 16 months journey. From idea to profitable business. The idea was born from a personal need. I wanted a tool that could help me proofread my texts on my phone or computer. My main inspiration was Grammarly. But better. (Delusion is a requirement for starting a business). I didn’t… - [My No-BS Building Process](https://diego.horse/the-building-process/) (2026-02-03): indie dev notes from building outside the VC fantasy - [The Social Fall, The Bird Rise](https://diego.horse/the-social-fall-the-bird-rise/) (2025-12-30): It was 5-ish in the morning and the Alexa in our bedroom was pulsing that eerie orange light. Usually, that means a notification is pending (or it’s trying to sell me a bird feeder it predicted I’d buy soon). I mumbled, “Alexa, read my notifications.” It was a message from our niece saying she missed… - [Reader Mode, RSS, and the Business of Interrupting You](https://diego.horse/reader-mode-rss-and-the-business-of-interrupting-you/) (2025-12-25): I used to be an RSS user, and I loved it. Most mornings started the same way, ginseng tea on the desk, laptop already warm, and Google Reader open before anything else so I could check what was new. I could easily read blogs written by friends (people I actually wanted to hear from, not… - [Smart Devices, Smart Tools, Me Smart?](https://diego.horse/smart-devices-smart-tools-me-smart/) (2025-11-26): If my phone’s supposed to be so smart, why do I feel dumb and empty when I’m holding it? Especially in public. I guess it all started with the miracle BlackBerry promised me back in the day… That was the big trick pitch: a corporate fantasy carved into a tiny plastic keyboard. Productivity in my… - [A Creek I Didn’t Mean to Fall Into](https://diego.horse/a-creek-i-didnt-mean-to-fall-into/) (2025-11-22): It was one of those gray SF days. Pandemic era. Everything was closed. I had been in the Bay Area for a bit, but I hadn’t really left the city much. Still very much a San Francisco rookie. One day I decided to take the first BART train to “anywhere” and see what happened. It… - [Tiny Games, Big Feelings](https://diego.horse/tiny-games-big-feelings/) (2025-11-13): Everything actually started when I played Loneliness. What a strange, quiet punch of a game. I wasn’t expecting much (it’s just little squares on a white screen) but somehow it managed to pull more emotions out of me in two minutes than most AAA games do in fifty hours. I walked away confused and weirdly… - [Air Fiesta: When the Balloons Multiplied](https://diego.horse/airfiesta-when-the-balloons-multiplied/) (2025-10-27): There was a time when everyone shared a single balloon. That was Airtales, one collective flight drifting wherever the crowd decided. Democracy by wind. Chaos by design. It was beautiful, but also… a little limiting. People wanted to explore their own skies. This is why it started and how it ended. That’s how Air Fiesta… - [Classic Programmer Paintings](https://diego.horse/classic-programmer-paintings/) (2025-10-16): From https://classicprogrammerpaintings.tumblr.com/ - [A Drop Ripples Outward](https://diego.horse/a-drop-ripples-outward/) (2025-09-09): When I first moved to San Francisco, I felt like just another tech bro leech, slurping up overpriced coffee, making rents go up, sucking the life out of the city, and giving absolutely nothing back. I had the whole starter pack: pitch deck, startup hoodie, a head full of “move fast” mantras that sounded deep… - [Airtales: When the Balloon Landed](https://diego.horse/airtales-when-the-balloon-landed/) (2025-08-29): Airtales was never meant to last forever. I even had a line on the roadmap asking when and where the balloon would land. Still, it drifted across Google Earth like a stubborn daydream, a collective ride where strangers became crew. Fifty days in the sky I spent about fifty days building it, then another fifty… - [The Story Behind Airtales](https://diego.horse/airtales-story/) (2025-07-24): We Ride the Plural of Horizon I created a game that offers a meditative multiplayer experience, where strangers on the internet work together to steer a hot air balloon across the world map. There are no points, no ads, and no reason to play, other than the shared pleasure of drifting somewhere together. It’s called… - [One Last Ride, Seventeen Million Reasons](https://diego.horse/one-last-ride-seventeen-million-reasons/) (2025-06-15): The good news: we did it again. AIDS/LifeCycle raised over 17 million dollars this year. That’s not a typo. Seventeen million. For HIV/AIDS services, prevention, advocacy, care. For actual lives. This time, I wasn’t riding. I was behind the scenes, lugging arrow signs and cleaning up the road as part of the Advance Route Marking… ## Machine-readable - [RSS](https://diego.horse/feed/): the 20 latest posts, full text - [Sitemap](https://diego.horse/sitemap.xml): every page - [Archive](https://diego.horse/archive/): every post by year, and every topic ## Elsewhere - https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7299-5295 - https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=FKEtvzkAAAAJ - https://www.linkedin.com/in/diegodotta/ - https://github.com/diegodotta - https://www.producthunt.com/@diegodottac - https://theorg.com/org/youper/org-chart/diego-dotta-couto - https://dev.to/diegodotta - https://diegodotta.itch.io - https://www.crunchbase.com/person/diego-dotta - https://about.me/diegodotta