About Pixel Thoughts
A small, free thing: write down whatever's stressing you, watch it shrink into a star, and let it drift off. Sixty seconds, and you feel a little lighter. I'm Marc, and this is the story of why I built it.
How it started
I'm Marc Balaban, a senior software engineer. I built Pixel Thoughts in 2015, over a weekend, for a hackathon. It was a tiny experiment: a worry, a star, a minute. You type the thing that's bothering you, watch it shrink and drift into space, and for a moment it feels smaller than it did in your head.
On a whim, I posted it to Reddit. It hit the front page. Overnight it went from a weekend project to something thousands of strangers were using to calm down. I wrote about what that was like. Press coverage followed. But it was never my main focus, so I'd tend to it now and then and let it keep running.
What I couldn’t ignore
What I couldn't ignore was how many people it was quietly helping. The notes kept coming, year after year. You can read some of them here. Then, almost by accident, I found out it had been studied at Harvard and Mass General in a real clinical trial. A team there used Pixel Thoughts as the tool, and a single 60-second session measurably lowered people's anxiety, depression, and anger. I had no idea until years after they ran it.
Where I want to take it
So I quit my job. I'm full-time on Pixel Thoughts now. The dream is a whole world of interactive mindfulness: more ways to sit with a thought, more small moments that leave you lighter. It's still free, it still takes a minute, and there's still no account and no ads. If it's ever helped you, you're part of why I get to build that.