Hero builds first daily super app with Rive

We run our daily lives by jumping between at least seven different apps: calendars, reminders, notes, weather, web browsers, and more. As a result, important details slip through the cracks, leaving us feeling scatterbrained. 

Hero Assistant, an AI super app, presents a new way. Launched in August of 2024, Hero’s mission is simple but bold: simplify your life by bringing it into one place. The design centers on a single feed of blocks — no more bouncing between different apps or endless tabs. Led by ex-Meta employees, Hero also has heavy-hitting investors, including co-founders from Instacart, Dropbox, and Behance.

With a small team and big ambitions, Hero brought their vision to life in record time, largely thanks to the flexibility and speed Rive offers in building interactive experiences.

It’s about design — not AI

While everyone is caught up in the hype of chasing new AI models, Hero's CEO, Brad Kowalk, thinks the bigger question is interface design. “While everyone tends to think of AI as a backend problem,” Brad says. “We think it’s equally a design challenge.”

Past super app attempts like Facebook Messenger and Twitter were focused on packing more tabs and menus into an app, leading to a cluttered experience. Hero dodges that trap by focusing on what’s been proven to work: a single, scrollable feed and voice control.

“We know from social media that a feed is the simplest interface. You just swipe up and down. The other big difference is voice. With that one button, you can scale to as many different functions as you want without adding more UI,” Brad explains. This streamlined, feed-based interface, combined with voice commands, eliminates the cognitive overload people face when managing their day across multiple apps. And by having everything in one place, each piece works together in a way that individual apps cannot do.

Rive: Hero’s superpower

Building a sophisticated, powerful app with just seven people is a tall order. The Hero team needed a tool that delivered high-quality animations and interactions without bogging down their devs. They considered using Lottie and After Effects, but those tools didn’t mesh well with their development workflow. That’s when they found Rive, a design tool that gave them the speed and flexibility they needed.

“Rive has been instrumental. Instead of having engineers build out the onboarding process, our designer did it all in Rive,” Brad shares. This approach let the team crank out 20 iterations quickly without constantly looping in software engineers. That level of speed and efficiency is necessary for a small, scrappy team aiming for a polished product.

“We needed it to look like a team of 100 people had been working on this for ten years. Rive gave us the confidence that we could do that with just a handful of designers and developers.”

Brad Kowalk, Chief Executive Officer, Hero

A designer’s perspective

For Akhil Patel, Hero’s sole product designer, Rive has been a revelation. Figma and After Effects fell short when it came time to integrate animations into Hero’s iOS app. When he found Rive through a “Rive vs. Lottie” article, Akhil was sold on its animation creation system. Although there was a learning curve, Rive’s state machines and runtime integrations proved worth the effort.

One of Akhil’s early experiments was a simple heart animation, which he handed over to a developer with a tutorial from Rive’s documentation. The developer quickly integrated the animation into the app. “We were able to see it running on the phone within a short period of time. That gave us more confidence in the turnaround time and that it wouldn’t take a lot of effort from the dev side,” Akhil recalls.

This realization — that much of the animation work could be handled by design rather than engineering — shifted how the team approached building Hero. As Rive rolled out more features, Akhil could directly take on everything from buttons and interactivity to dynamic text in Rive, leaving developers to focus on core product features.

Rising above other apps

Brad recalls how one of their investors questioned the decision to invest time in animations instead of focusing on shipping an MVP. “The bar has risen significantly for consumer apps,” Brad says. “We needed it to look like a team of 100 people had been working on this for ten years. Rive gave us the confidence that we could do that with just a handful of designers and developers.”

Thanks partly to Rive, Hero looks and feels like a big-budget app. Their animations add personality and charm, like a heart animation when users connect with their partners or playful visuals when asking questions. 

Rive as a strategic advantage

For Hero, Rive has proven to be more than just a design tool — it’s a strategic advantage. Akhil sums it up best: “Getting nearly our whole workflow into Rive gave us an edge in speed.” By allowing the team to create animations and interactive elements without heavy developer involvement, Rive has enabled Hero to move quickly and build a premium and well-thought-out product.