Overview

Hatched gives a product a buddy — a companion that grows as its user does. Everything else on Hatched exists to feed the buddy: events go in, effects come out, a widget shows the result.

The whole picture in one paragraph

A user does something in your product (lesson_completed, checkout_succeeded). You send it as an event. The rule engine turns it into effects — skills level up, coins are earned, a badge might unlock, a streak ticks, the buddy moves closer to its next evolution stage. Users spend coins in the marketplace. Your backend gets webhooks when anything interesting happens.

The primitives

• Buddy & hatch — the avatar, born from an egg, growing through evolution stages.
• Skills — numeric dimensions like Grammar or Stamina that level up over time.
• Coins — the primary currency, earned from events, spent in the marketplace.
• Tokens — secondary currencies (gems, hearts, stars) for more specialised economies.
• Streaks — consistency counters that tick daily and reward habit.
• Badges — one-shot achievements that mark a specific moment.
• Marketplace — where users spend coins on items that show up in the widget.
• Leaderboard — competitive ranking with scoped visibility.
• Evolution — the long-horizon arc; the buddy changes appearance at milestones.
• Audiences — segmenting one customer into multiple user groups with separate rules.
• Config versions — immutable snapshots of the whole rule set, pinned per buddy.
• Rule engine — the deterministic pipeline that converts events into effects.
• Webhooks — signed HTTP callbacks that let your backend react to anything.

Design principles

• Template-first over free-form. Rule types are a fixed enum; we chose fewer knobs over infinite configurability.
• Publish before live. Config changes land on a draft, then get published as a new immutable version. Existing buddies stay on their pinned version.
• Canonical state in Hatched. Your product can keep a copy for UX, but Hatched owns the truth.
• Async by default. Image generation, webhook delivery and other slow paths run off a queue and expose an operation you can poll.