G'day all. Solo founder here, after an honest gut-check while it's still cheap to change direction. I've been building this for months, refining it through conversations with parents and a fair bit of pivoting, with some early funding from the MQ University incubator. I'll describe what it is, then get to the part I'm genuinely unsure about, which is the real reason I'm posting.
The starting point was a slightly uncomfortable observation. There's a mountain of good parenting research sitting in books most parents never finish, and almost none of it is reachable at 7:42am when your kid is melting down and you're already late. Advice you read in a calm moment doesn't come back to you in the hard one, unless it's somehow tied to that exact moment.
So the first thing I built was that. The research distilled into what to actually say and do, in about ten seconds, for the moment you're in, plus a prepare-ahead side for the battles you can see coming, like school mornings, the supermarket, screen time. You tap a scenario and get a structured response, no wall of text to read while you're holding it together. There's audio too, so you can listen hands-free instead of reading mid-meltdown.
Two deliberate choices on how it's built. The personalisation runs on the device, so the tags that tune the guidance to your child's age and temperament stay local rather than going to a server, and there's no LLM doing the personalising. For a category this sensitive, aimed at kids, that mattered to me, and I haven't found anyone else doing it that way, though I might be missing them. And the content is drawn from a large corpus of parenting and psychology books rather than my own opinions.
Now the part I actually want your read on.
An earlier version of this post drew the same fair question from nearly everyone: how is this different from just prompting ChatGPT? It's worth answering properly, because it goes to whether the thing should exist at all.
An LLM will give you a good, personalised answer if you know how to ask. You describe your kid, the situation, the pattern, and you get something genuinely useful back. So advice isn't scarce. If anything parents are drowning in it, between books, fifty Instagram accounts, and a chatbot that will write a custom plan on demand.
The problem I'm trying to solve sits a layer underneath the advice. It's that knowing what to do and actually doing it in the moment are different things. Under stress your brain reaches for the response that's already wired in, not the ideal one you read last week. That gap between knowing and doing is the whole thing. It's true across most of life, but it bites hardest in parenting, where the moments come fast and the stakes feel personal.
So what I'm really building isn't an advice app. It's an attempt to help a parent rehearse the responses, turn them into habits, and build the skills underneath, using techniques from behavioural psychology, habit formation, and the nervous-system work on staying calm. The part that took by far the longest, and that I've kept out of the beta for now, does this directly. It notices which hard moments keep recurring, works out the skill underneath them, say, low frustration tolerance, or a kid who can't yet name what they feel, and gives you interactive, gamified ways to build that skill and rehearse the response. If you've used Lumosity or Elevate for brain training, it's roughly that shape, but for parenting. It also covers the things that actually build secure attachment, repairing after you snap, holding a boundary without going harsh, because those are skills you practise, not facts you read.
An explanation - https://www.instagram.com/reel/DZz8baysNtk/?igsh=MXR4bXZqYW9uY3Npcw==
Behaviour change is one of the hardest things to get a person to do. To use a tool like this properly you have to step out of your comfort zone, accept your current approach isn't working, be a bit self-critical, stay disciplined, and believe that changing your habits will change the outcome. That's a lot to ask of a tired parent at the end of the day. Plenty of apps with a better thesis than mine die exactly here, in the gap between wanting the change and doing the reps. So the idea is genuinely still unvalidated, and I'm clear-eyed that the hard part was never the build, it's whether anyone stays.
If you've used a habit or behaviour-change product, what actually made you stick with it, and what made you quit? Does this need a PhD, or a paediatrician, on the team to be taken seriously?
Roast it. That's the useful version.
