The Pebble Onboarding: Five Questions Before the Journal

Most apps want to get you into the product as quickly as possible. Reduce friction, minimize onboarding, get to the first "aha moment" in three clicks or fewer.

Stone Maps does the opposite. Before you can write your first journal entry, you answer five questions. The app won't continue until you do.

This is not an accident.

What the Questions Are

The five genesis questions are:

1. A place that feels like home — not necessarily where you grew up. A place whose quality you carry with you.
2. A quality you want to hold — something you want to be, or remember to be.
3. Something that makes you think about deep time — a geological formation, a tree, a tradition, a building. Something that puts your life in perspective.
4. A place of wonder — somewhere that makes you feel small in the right way.
5. An intention — open-ended. What are you here for?

These are stored as genesisTraits on the stone record:

export type GenesisTraits = {
  placeLikeHome?: string;
  qualityToHold?: string;
  deepTime?: string;
  wonderPlace?: string;
  intention?: string;
};

They're attached to the stone, not the user. That distinction is intentional: the stone carries the genesis. If you ever pair with a different stone, you'd answer again. The answers are situated in the act of activation, not extracted as permanent profile data.

Why a Pebble

A "pebble" is the digital-only kind of stone. If you don't have a physical stone to scan, the app creates a virtual pebble for you. The name comes from scale — smaller, lighter, not the same weight as a physical stone you've held and named. But it functions identically.

The pebble onboarding flow is how most early-access users enter the app. Scan a QR code on a physical stone → beautiful. But we can't send everyone a stone before they try it. The pebble creates a viable path in.

The onboarding flow for a pebble is the same as for a physical stone, except instead of the QR activation screen, you're presented directly with the stone naming step, then the genesis questions.

You name your pebble first. Before you answer the questions, you've already done something quietly significant: you've introduced yourself to it. Or rather, you've named it. There's a difference between "my account" and "my pebble named Dusk" that we think matters.

Gating the App

The genesisCompletedAt timestamp on the stone record is the gate. Until it's set, the app redirects you back to onboarding.

This is enforced in the middleware/layout level, not per-page. We don't want a user who skipped genesis to land on the journal page and see an empty state with no context for what they're supposed to do. The onboarding is the context.

It's also enforced because the Emissary reads genesis traits in every conversation. If those traits are empty, the Emissary is having a conversation with a stranger. That might be fine eventually — there's an interesting case for an Emissary that doesn't know you yet — but for now, genesis is required before conversation starts.

What the Questions Do to the Conversation

The Emissary receives genesis traits in its system prompt. Not as a list of facts to recite, but as texture. If you said your place-like-home is the smell of rain on hot pavement in a specific city, the Emissary isn't going to repeat that back to you. It's going to let that shape how it talks about place, memory, time.

Stone traits — personality descriptors assigned to the stone — work similarly. A stone described as "patient, rooted, oceanic" produces a different conversational texture than one described as "sharp, mobile, curious."

These inputs don't make the Emissary dramatically different in every message. They make it subtly different over time. The philosophy here is that slow accumulation of meaning is more valuable than immediate personalization. The Emissary knowing your intention after three months of journaling is more interesting than it knowing your home city in the first five seconds.

The Threshold as Design

The five questions are a threshold. They take time. They require you to think. They are not optimized to be easy.

This is where the "slow over fast" philosophy becomes concrete. Frictionless onboarding would let you skip this — set up your account in 30 seconds, get to the journal, fill in your profile later (which you won't, because you never do). Stone Maps asks you to slow down before you even start.

It costs some users. Some people will see five text fields and leave. That's okay. The users who answer the questions are starting something different than a user who skipped them. The journal is better for it.