I found three Target cards in a drawer last Christmas. Two of them had been in there long enough that a pen had started leaking onto one of them. The other was clipped to a birthday card that said "To Christian, love Aunt Jean, 2021."
Aunt Jean gave me a $50 Target card in 2021 and I never used it. Every Target run for four years, I paid with my card again while her $50 sat in a drawer.
I want to be clear about how that felt, not angry, not embarrassed exactly. Just a small, flat kind of bad. Someone had spent fifty real dollars to do something nice, and it had silently failed. The card didn't know it had failed. The drawer didn't know. Aunt Jean, I hope, had forgotten about it; but even that's a little sad in its own way. Two people's attention had rolled off the edge of a table and nothing caught it.
About $3 billion of gift card value goes unused in the United States every year. The number is so abstract it stops meaning anything, so think of it instead as every drawer in every household with a Target card clipped to a birthday card from four years ago. That is the real shape of the number.
The question I got stuck on, the one that actually led to the rest of this project, was: what would have had to happen for me to use that card?
Not morally. Mechanically. Step by step.
I would have had to remember that the card existed. Which meant I would have had to think about it at some moment other than Christmas morning 2021. I would have had to remember it again on a different day, a random Tuesday, specifically while I was planning a Target run. I would have had to find the card, physically, before leaving the house. I would have had to not leave it in the car. I would have had to get to the register, swipe it, hope it still had a balance on it, and hope the register's "redeem gift card" sub-menu still worked like I remembered it working. If any of those steps failed, the $50 stayed in the drawer. Five things. Any one of them breaks, the card dies.
Most of them are pure memory problems. One of them is a logistics problem. None of them is hard. But they all have to land.
What struck me was that every piece of that chain is something a phone is theoretically great at. My phone knows when I'm at a Target. It knows what's in my wallet. It knows what I'm doing tomorrow. It knows how often I've been to that specific Target in the past six months. It has a front-facing camera that, in about eleven seconds, could have read the card and saved it on the way home from Christmas dinner in 2021.
The phone was not the problem. The app was the problem. No one had built the app that would have caught the card before it hit the drawer.
I started building it for myself, the way people usually do, as a small personal utility with no brand and too many TODO comments. What surprised me was how many layers it needed to do the one thing I wanted it to do. The camera had to be smart enough to read the card without me aiming. The reminder system had to be quiet enough to be trustworthy. The location engine had to know the difference between me walking into the store and me driving past the store on a highway. The design had to feel like an heirloom wallet, not another badge icon. The voice had to sound like a friend, not an alert.
None of that is separately hard. All of it together is why there isn't a good version of this app yet.
The thing I kept coming back to, and keep coming back to, is that the real job of the app is not to show gift cards. You can already open your drawer and see the cards, that's not the failure mode. The real job of the app is to remember them on your behalf, at the exact right moment, and then get out of your way. The showing is the end; the remembering is the work.
Cue is the version of that idea I've been able to build so far. It scans cards, yes. It stores balances, yes. It has a wallet view, barcodes, PIN protection, all of that. But the part I'm the most proud of is the part nobody sees: the machinery that decides, for any given minute of your day, whether this is the minute to mention it.
If you are interested in the architecture, the Complete Press Kit has the unedited version, seven modules, five gates, four on-device frameworks, the whole thing. But for the purposes of this post, the part that matters is small.
The part that matters is the drawer. The Aunt Jeans. The $50 that would, in a different world, have been two dinners at Chipotle and a tip.
The app I'm building is a very small answer to that. It doesn't solve the drawer, the drawer was never the problem. It solves the distance between the card and the register. Thirty seconds of distance. That's the whole product.
And no. I have not gotten around to using those three Target cards yet. But they're in the app now. And when I'm next at Target, I'll know.