We met during COVID. Our first date was on Zoom. Questions are what kept us together.
This is how GoDeeper started.
We met in 2020. COVID was months in, the borders were closed, and you couldn't legally drive more than 5km from home.
We lived an hour apart.
Our first date was on Zoom.
Phase 01 · An hour apart
There was no coffee shop. No wine bar. No reading the room across a table. Just a screen, a call, and the particular kind of attention you have to pay when you can't fill silence by looking at the menu.
So we asked each other questions.
Not the résumé kind. Real ones. The kind where you have to think before you answer. The kind where you can't tell how the other person will take it. We did this for weeks — over calls, over voice messages, through the slow lifting and re-tightening of restrictions. Questions became how we knew each other before we were in the same room.
When we finally were in the same room, they didn't stop.
Phase 02 · The questions stayed
Some couples outgrow the early conversations. We didn't. Questions became a habit — not a formal thing, not a ritual, just part of how we are. At dinner, one of us will pull out the app and read one aloud. In the car on a long drive. On the couch at the end of a week when there isn't much to report but something still needs saying.
It has helped us grow together in a way I haven't experienced with anyone before. Not because the questions are magic, but because they make you pay attention. To the other person. To what's actually true for you when you answer.
Phase 03 · Moving interstate
We moved from Melbourne to Newcastle together. New city, new jobs, new friends to make. The questions helped us stay close to each other while everything else was being rebuilt from scratch.
Phase 04 · Moving in
When you live with someone, you think you run out of things to say. You don't. You just need better questions. Not "how was your day" — that one stops working after a few weeks. Something more specific. Something that requires an actual answer.
Phase 05 · Getting engaged
We got engaged in 2023. On a walk, mid-conversation, the way things happen when you've talked enough to know the answer before the question is asked.
Phase 06 · Starting a family
This year, we're having a baby.
There are things about becoming a parent that you can't prepare for — but you can talk about them. What kind of people do we want to be for this person? What did our parents get right? What do we want to do differently? We've been asking each other these for months.
Phase 07 · Why we built this
We looked for an app that did what questions had done for us. We didn't find one.
There were apps with points and streaks. Apps that gamified the thing we were trying to protect. Apps that interrupted the conversation to remind you to come back tomorrow.
We wanted something quiet. Something that trusted the conversation to do the work.
Greg completed Gottman Level 1 relationship coaching during this time and is working through Level 2. The Gottman research — decades of observational data on what makes relationships last — kept pointing to the same thing: couples who ask each other real questions, and actually listen to the answers, do better. Not a surprise. But it's good to have the science behind what we'd already found to be true.
GoDeeper is the deck we wished had existed in 2020, when we were an hour apart and the only thing we could do was talk.
"If you're at the start of something, or six years in, the questions are the same. Pull a card. Read it out loud. Answer honestly."
WORDS · GREG & KATE