Pre-launchHey Family
Small nudges to actually be present with your kid.
The small moments are the whole thing, one tiny specific nudge at a time. No streaks, no scores.
Why I built it
I kept noticing this gap between wanting to be a present parent and actually doing something about it in the moment. It is never about not caring, it is the friction. So I built Hey Family to close that gap with tiny, specific, guilt-free nudges that meet parents where they are. It is two companion apps, HeyDad and HeyMom, each with its own voice, sharing one household so a couple can stay coordinated but still have their own private experience. And I deliberately left out streaks and scores, because the last thing a parent needs is one more thing making them feel like they are falling behind.
What it does for people
- Proactive nudges that hand you one small, specific idea at a time so you connect before the moment slips by
- A curated activity catalog that filters by the time you have got, the kid's age and setting, and quietly re-tunes as your kids grow
- A lightweight moments journal, with a toggle to share memories across the household or keep them just yours
- Two distinct app voices. HeyDad is action-first and direct, HeyMom is warmer and observation-first
- Full solo mode as a first-class experience, so you get everything even if you never link a partner
Under the hood
- One React Native and Expo TypeScript codebase producing two genuinely separate native apps, HeyDad and HeyMom, plus real iOS and Android binaries, wired through EAS
- A privacy-by-design data model with three layers: shared household data, parent-private data that literally never syncs, and configurable-visibility data you control
- Postgres row-level security doing the heavy lifting on that privacy boundary, hardened across 21 migrations so one parent can never see the other's nudges
- Native home-screen widgets on both platforms via react-native-android-widget
- Supabase Edge Functions handling weekly recaps, shared-moment push, and RevenueCat webhooks
The cool bits
- The tone is the product. I treated warmth as a real feature and built a tone-check tooling pass to keep copy from ever feeling clinical or guilt-trippy
- No streaks, no scores, on purpose. It is a warm journal, not a productivity dashboard
- Two apps, two personalities, one brain. HeyDad in Warm Earth, HeyMom in Soft Dusk, sharing a backend but never feeling like the same app
- The whole thing was scaffolded to be built with Claude Code, custom skills, and subagents like a tone reviewer and a privacy auditor
How long it took
About two months of focused building.
2 months · 4 sprints · 94 commits
What I worked through
The hardest part by far was the privacy boundary. Getting Postgres row-level security exactly right so two parents in the same household share their kids and moments but can never see each other's nudges took real iteration. There is a whole trail of RLS migrations to prove it. On top of that, keeping two separate apps in sync from a single codebase, wiring up native widgets on both platforms, and layering in subscriptions, push and weekly recaps all had to come together without ever compromising that privacy promise.