Werner Masseglia

In a few questions

What do you do when you're not building apps?

I'm a fraud & revenue assurance expert in the telecom industry. I write fraud-detection scripts.

How did it start?

With We Color Blocks, and it was a challenge I set myself. I kept seeing people playing games on their phone on the train, and I wondered whether I could build one. So I did.

And after that?

After We Color Blocks I decided the next apps would answer real needs — mine and those around me. We Boat came from sitting my boating licence. We IBD came from living with IBD — I wrote that whole story down: why I built We IBD. And We Math came from a child close to me who was stuck on maths: I wanted an app that makes maths good to work on, with something to earn at the end of it. The app confirms the goal was met; the parent decides what the reward is — it never promises what it doesn't control.

Once a problem was solved for me, it seemed worth sharing the solution with everyone else facing the same thing.

How do you approach a problem?

I try to understand the problem, and then bring a solution to it.

Is there anything you won't build?

Anything to do with telecom. It's my day job, and I don't want any conflict of interest with my main employer.

What's the hardest part of working alone?

Knowing whether the product is good enough — whether it's mature, whether there's no mistake left in it. That can be stressful, because I care about shipping quality.

One thing follows from all of it: the apps are offline-first and privacy-first. What can stay on your device stays on your device, and each app publishes its own privacy policy — never a shared one — because each one collects different things, and some collect nothing at all.