A Digital Platform Families Can Trust

At a Glance

Client: Moxies
Founder: Juliette Blake  
Focus: A digital platform for girls ages 8–12, designed around creativity, confidence, healthier online habits, and safer connection
Engagement: Product roadmap, V1 build, and ongoing product iteration

Engagement Outcomes

• Funding: Amodhi’s detailed build plan, budget, estimated hours, and scope rationale gave Juliette concrete materials to include in a grant application that, in her words, was a large part of how she received funding.
• Product architecture: Parent feedback on early concepts informed a social model built around private, invite-only, parent-controlled groups, with moderation and safety considered at the infrastructure level.
• Roadmap discipline: Coura helped Moxies distinguish between work that needed to happen for a given release and work that could be deferred without compromising the larger product.
• Technical prioritization: The team made room for back-end stability and security alongside customer-facing features, preserving the ability to build on the product rather than repeatedly rework it.
• Reported and Validated outcomes: Juliette reports that 80% of girls have improved confidence, mood, and self-regulation; 98% say Moxies makes them want to be kinder to themselves and others; and 100% say it makes them want to be creative. Her figures are scientifically grounded in validated assessment tools, with PhD-level research support throughout development and analysis.

Today, Moxies is a live product for tween girls that continues to evolve around the simple premise that a digital experience can be healthy and engaging without being built to extract as much attention as possible, prioritizing the well-being of its user base and healthier digital habits. 

A guided, play-first customization experience lets girls build a Moxie that feels like them, choosing core features like hair, mood, and outfit, then unlocking new items as they explore the app.

Where Moxies Started

Juliette Blake has always been crystal clear on the central premise of Moxies. She’d already spent time contemplating what it would mean to build a digital environment where girls could play, create, and connect without importing the pressures that dominate so much of the internet. She came to Coura with a basic clickable Figma prototype that had already surfaced useful evidence of where parents’ instincts diverged from the product’s earliest assumptions.

The most consequential feedback concerned the in-app chat function. Assurances about moderation did not remotely persuade parents if their children might still encounter strangers. That reaction codified the level at which safety would need to operate, and raised the challenge of deciding how the platform’s structure could safely help these young girls make the right kind of connection possible in the first place.

At the same time, Juliette was applying for a grant that could fund the first build. She needed more than a compelling vision. She needed to show what a first release would contain, what it would cost, what could wait, and why the resulting product would be a credible foundation for future work.

Other prospective development partners had approached the project as a full-build commitment, which made little to no sense for a company still testing the first expression of a large idea. 

Coura, however, was committed to working with the constraints on Moxies created by a finite amount of capital, early customer feedback, and a product that would need to learn in public.

From Vision to a Fundable Build

Before writing code, Amodhi and the Coura team helped turn the Moxies vision into a detailed plan covering scope, estimated hours, budget, feature priorities, and an account of how the first build would support, not foreclose, the next phase.

The difference was immediately noticeable. 

“Someone actually sat down and helped me back into what I needed to get to. The work that was done on the Coura side fully helped me get that grant,” Juliette said, a claim that matters because it locates Coura’s contribution before the product existed: in making the build understandable enough to fund.

The scoping exercise required a view of the whole product and a willingness to be exacting about which elements belonged in its first version. Juliette described the value in practical terms, saying Amodhi understood the larger ambition while helping ensure “that we’re not spending money and building something that in six months is going to be worthless.”

For an early-stage company, a roadmap doesn’t merely allocate features across a timeline; it determines whether each investment creates optionality or consumes it.

When the Build Became Collaborative

Once the build was underway, the roadmap became a living part of the relationship, where Juliette and Amodhi had to navigate decisions about how new funding should be allocated, which improvements would have the greatest impact, and when less visible technical work needed to take precedence over a feature users could immediately see.

Juliette brought the perspective of a founder close to her community and deeply invested in the experience Moxies would create. Amodhi brought the technical context needed to make the tradeoffs visible, while always being open to Juliette’s feedback and concerns. Juliette could question a recommendation, explain what mattered to the business, and work with the team toward a path that respected both the product’s purpose and limitations.

As she put it, “There’s no part of me that felt alone in this process of building something technical.”

Decisions That Shaped Moxies

The decisions behind Moxies’ build were closely connected, and Coura’s role was to help Juliette see those connections clearly enough to make decisions that held up beyond a single release.

Funding the Right First Build

• Challenge
  Juliette needed a credible plan for a grant application, but the full Moxies vision could not be funded or built at once. A vague proposal would not give funders confidence, while an oversized build would not reflect the company’s immediate reality.

• Experience-Informed insight
  Coura developed a scoped, budget-aware V1 plan that translated Juliette’s vision into a phased V1 plan with a defined scope, budget, estimated hours, and the underlying decisions required to make later iterations possible.

• Result
  Juliette included that plan in her grant application and received the funding. The company could move from an early prototype and parent feedback into a funded build with a clearer path for what came next. 

Making Safety Structural

• Challenge
  The original prototype surfaced the serious concern that parents did not want their children navigating an environment where strangers could reach them, even if that environment included moderation.

• Strategic insight
  Amodhi helped Juliette rethink the infrastructure of the technical work required to support the Moxies social model. Rather than building a custom chat platform simply because chat was part of the concept, the team evaluated established options against Moxies’ requirements for moderation, customization, and time controls. Juliette remembers the recommendation clearly: “You don’t need to build your own chat platform. We don’t need to reinvent the wheel.” Girls could join through private, invite-only, parent-controlled group codes, giving Moxies a way to support connection while respecting what families needed in order to place trust in the product.

• Result
  Safety as a north star became embedded in the way Moxies operates rather than introduced as a later layer of control. “Coura truly helped us create a safe-by-design platform for kids by default,” Juliette said. “It wasn’t an afterthought.” In her view, the design choices made from the beginning also support the well-being outcomes Moxies now tracks.

Investing in the Work Users Don’t See

• Challenge
  It’s easy to position new features as outward signs of progress, whereas infrastructure, stability, and security can feel harder to justify when capital is tight, and the product roadmap remains full.

• Strategic insight  
  Amodhi helped Juliette assess which technical investments needed to come first, even when they were less visible to the people using Moxies, to keep Moxies from accumulating the kind of technical debt that would make future ambitions more expensive or less reliable.

• Result  
  Moxies directed a significant portion of a recent budget toward back-end infrastructure. “A large amount of our budget went toward a lot of very unsexy back-end infrastructure things,” Juliette said, before describing how Amodhi explained why that allocation was “actually the best decision I could be making” and “imperative.”

Sequencing a Product Moment

• Challenge
  Ahead of Moxies’ May 2026 mother-daughter event, the Coura had severely limited time to deliver a substantial update that would intersect with brand partnerships, new-user acquisition, and a public product experience that needed to support the marketing work surrounding it.

• Strategic insight
  Coura worked with Juliette to identify what had to be live for the event and what could follow shortly afterward. App Store considerations, paywall decisions, and release sequencing were all held against the question: how can we ensure that this still backs up and supports the marketing initiative you have, and that you’re not showing up to the event and you don’t have the product you want to be there?

• Result
  The team could plan against a fixed public moment without allowing the deadline to flatten every product decision into an emergency. The May update supported the event while preserving room for work that didn’t need to ship just because the event was approaching.

The Product Moxies Is Building

Moxies launched V1 in July 2025, but the company has not treated launch as the point at which the product became settled. The platform continues to evolve, with each iteration returning to the same operating questions of what makes an experience genuinely appealing to girls, what gives parents reason to trust it, and what forms of engagement are compatible with the company’s purpose.

That orientation is distinct from a conventional growth model built around maximizing time spent. Juliette has been clear that Moxies does not want to reproduce features such as likes or streaks simply because they are familiar tools for driving repeat use. The product still needs to be enjoyable, playful, and worth returning to. The team designed it to do so without treating attention as the sole measure of success.

Juliette shared that 80% of girls using Moxies have improved confidence, mood, and self-regulation. She also reports that 98% say Moxies makes them want to be kinder to themselves and others, while 100% say it makes them want to be creative,  figures developed and analyzed with PhD-level research support and adapted from validated measures including the Digital Literacy Scale, Middle Years, Development Instrument, NIH Toolbox Self-Efficacy and Companionship measures, and the Child Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale.

What Juliette Measures Against

The value of a product relationship is rarely clear in a kickoff meeting, but it often hits a founder squarely when they have to defer an early feature, when an event creates a non-negotiable date, when funding comes in unevenly, or when they need to decide whether a visible improvement is worth making before the system beneath it is ready.

Juliette has referred other founders to Coura, including founders who had already spent heavily and fallen behind schedule with other development partners. Her own comparison is pointed: “I may have raised less money, but I delivered my project on time, and I only have good things to say about the team I worked with, without wasting dollars.”

Through this partnership, Juliette has, in her own words, found a true thought partner that helped her confidently make hard decisions by translating the product and technical implications into something concrete and digestible. That’s what allowed Moxies to continually move forward without losing the principles that made the company worth building.

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If you have early customer signal, a finite build budget, and a product decision you cannot afford to get wrong, talk with Coura before you commit the first round of development spend.

Reach out today.