A small team, building one quiet, careful thing.

EnneagramGenius began as a private tool a handful of us used to prepare for hard conversations. It’s now a company — still small, still careful — shipping what we wish had been shipped to us ten years ago.

The Enneagram is the most useful map of human motivation we’ve encountered. It’s also the most abused — flattened into quizzes, turned into horoscopes, weaponized in group chats.

We set out to build the opposite: a tool that treats the framework with the seriousness it deserves, applies it with AI-grade specificity, and holds every result lightly — because a type is a starting point, not a sentence.

“Relational intelligence, rendered.”
— our whole pitch, seven years in.

We’re not trying to be everyone’s personality app. We’re trying to be the single tool a certain kind of person returns to — in a hard week, before a difficult conversation, after their partner says something that took them by surprise.

Seven principles we refuse to negotiate away.

I.

Free will always mean free.

The assessment — full, 100 items, with the complete written profile — is free forever. No paywall, no upsell inside the profile, no "unlock your wing" trick. The floor is the floor.

II.

Your data is yours.

We don’t sell it. We don’t resell it. We don’t advertise against it. Delete your account, everything we’ve ever written about you goes with it — including AI outputs.

III.

No type-as-diagnosis, ever.

The Enneagram is a map of motivation, not a clinical instrument. Our copy says so. Our AI is tuned to say so. Our coaches know to say so.

IV.

We write like humans. We ship like writers.

Every module is drafted by a model, passed through a human review, and then re-edited for voice. If a sentence sounds like AI, it doesn’t ship.

V.

Privacy is an architecture, not a policy.

Row-level security on every table. Minimum-data by default. Private by default across teams, shared on explicit consent — always.

VI.

We design for the hard week.

Most tools are tested on a good day. We test on a bad one. If a feature can hurt someone when they’re at 10% battery, we rethink the feature.

VII.

We stay small on purpose.

A team of 8, by design. The next ten hires are writers, researchers, and security engineers. No growth team. No paid acquisition. No quarterly roadmap review.

A cast of eight — and most of the types.

S

Shelby White

Founder · writing, product
Previously a writer at a financial publication, then a PM at two B2B SaaS companies. Started the internal version of this tool in 2019 to prepare for a co-founder conversation.
Type 5w4, sp/so. Has a favorite Type 2.
P

Priya Menon

Research lead · psychometrics
PhD in quantitative psychology. Owns the design and ongoing calibration of our assessment instrument. Spends weekends writing about test reliability on her blog. See /methodology for the current state of the re-norming work.
Type 1w2, sx/so.
M

Marcus Osei

Engineering lead
Eight years at a privacy-first messaging company. Owns the data minimization architecture and the ‘delete means delete’ promise. Has never run a meeting longer than 32 minutes.
Type 8w7, sp/sx.
E

Elena Russo

Head of AI · content pipeline
Built the 14-module content architecture and the two-pass review system. Former literary editor. Writes the AI’s voice guide the way most people write a novel.
Type 4w5, so/sx.
T

Tobias Lindqvist

Design
The reason your type page doesn’t feel like a SaaS dashboard. Previously at a Swedish newspaper redesigning editorial systems. Obsessive about typography; polite about it.
Type 6w5, sp/so.
H

Hana Takahashi

Coach relations
20 years as an Enneagram practitioner and trainer. Leads our coach advisory board and writes the ethics doc we live by. Keeper of the phrase "hold results lightly."
Type 2w1, so/sp.

Standing on decades of careful Enneagram scholarship.

We don’t invent Enneagram theory. We interpret, apply, and make it readable with the respect of people who’ve sat in the rooms where the work actually happens.

Our knowledge base is grounded in the following traditions. Every AI output is retrieval-augmented against curated, attributed source material.

Riso-Hudson levels of development
Don Richard Riso & Russ Hudson · Enneagram Institute · primary typing framework
The Narrative Enneagram
Helen Palmer, David Daniels · interview-based lineage
Claudio Naranjo\u2019s protoanalysis
Claudio Naranjo · foundational motivational structure
Naranjo, C. (1990). Ennea-type Structures: Self-Analysis for the Seeker. Gateways/IDHHB.
Don Richard Riso\u2019s wing & instinct work
Don Richard Riso · full-profile model used throughout the app
Riso, D. R. (1996). Personality Types: Using the Enneagram for Self-Discovery (2nd ed.). Houghton Mifflin.
Beatrice Chestnut\u2019s 27 subtypes
Beatrice Chestnut · instinct-stack architecture

Twenty minutes. Free. Yours.

You’ll know within five questions whether this tool is going to mean anything to you. Most of the people who find their way here become quiet evangelists for it. A few don’t. Both are fine.

Take the assessment