It’s hard to say sorry.

There are a million ways to do it wrong. Most people know the obvious ones — don’t say “I’m sorry, but...” or “I’m sorry you feel that way.”

But there are other sneakier ways we invalidate our own efforts to apologize: by burdening the receiver with our emotions (“I feel terrible”), asking for anything in return (“Please forgive me”), and explaining our actions (“I didn’t know”). An apology should be a gift for the person you've hurt.

We were inspired by a podcast by Brené Brown and Harriet Lerner about the magic of apologizing. But we also realized that it’s really hard to hold all of the guidelines in your head at once. So we teamed up with web guru Gordy to build a website that can help anyone write better apologies.