At 7:15 on a Tuesday morning, my four-year-old was lying flat on the kitchen floor, staring at the ceiling, while his toothbrush sat untouched on the counter. We had exactly nine minutes before we needed to leave for preschool. The toothpaste tube was still capped. He was humming something from a cartoon I didn’t recognize.
This was not a power struggle. It wasn’t defiance. It was simply that brushing his teeth did not exist in his world unless I said the words “brushing teeth” out loud, and even then it only existed as a vague concept that required another three reminders to become an actual action. He wasn’t being difficult. He just didn’t have the internal loop that adults take for granted: cue, action, reward, repeat. For a child that age, every morning is basically a long series of things that happen to you until you get to do something you actually enjoy.
That’s when the idea for the app started. Not with a vision board or a smart business plan, but with a parent kneeling on linoleum, partially dressed, holding a strawberry-flavored toothpaste tube like a tiny white flag.
My background is in user experience design, and I had been reading a lot about habit formation—mostly for adults. Apps like Duolingo and Habitica had cracked the code for keeping grown-ups engaged. But those apps assumed you could read, that you understood the concept of a streak, that a cartoon owl yelling at you was motivating rather than terrifying. Kids don’t work that way. They live entirely in the present. A habit isn’t a checkmark on a calendar; it’s just something that happens, usually because a grown-up says so.
So I started sketching ideas on the back of a cereal box. What if a child had a simple visual routine they could follow, like a path of stones leading to something pleasant? What if the app didn’t track “habits” but instead helped them move through a sequence—get dressed, brush teeth, put on shoes—with a tiny character doing the same actions alongside them? I showed the sketch to my son. He looked at it for a second, then said, “That’s a rock. Can it be a dog?” So that was my first lesson: kids need characters. They don’t care about your elegant UX logic if there isn’t a creature with a silly hat.
Over the next few weekends, I built a prototype with my co-founder, who also happened to be my brother. We kept it absurdly simple. No points. No timers. No confetti explosions. The child chooses a sequence of tasks (or the parent sets it up), and then a friendly blob named Pebble—so named because a habit is like a pebble you drop on the same spot every day until it becomes a path—shows them what to do. Pebble eats breakfast. Pebble washes hands. Pebble puts on socks. The child taps each step and sees Pebble doing it, then they do it in real life. That’s it.
The naming process was its own little adventure. We had a whiteboard full of candidates: “Tidy Bug,” “Sprout,” “Routine Roundup,” “Hop Dot.” Each one felt wrong for different reasons. “Seedling” was too precious. “Chore Champ” sounded like punishment. “Loop” was accurate but felt sterile. My brother was convinced we should call it “DoDo” because it sounded like “do” and also like a dopey bird, but our test group of three neighborhood kids just giggled and shouted “poopoo” every time they saw the logo. So that was out.
Pebble stuck because of a conversation I had with my five-year-old niece. She was testing the app and asked what the yellow blob was called. I said I didn’t know yet. She looked at the app, then at the floor, picked up a small grey pebble from the doormat, and said, “It’s a pebble. Because it’s little and it sits on the ground, and if you put a lot of them together you can walk on them.” I had been overthinking it. The name needed to be something a child could hold in their hand, not a concept written in a pitch deck.
The real insight from all this came when we started watching how kids actually used the prototype in their homes. The app worked best when it was not the center of the routine. It was the support structure. One mom told me that her daughter would wake up and say, “What does Pebble do first?” and then go check the app, but she didn’t need the app to complete the task. It was more like a picture book that happened to be interactive. Another family found that the app only worked for a week before the novelty wore off, and then they set it aside and the routine continued anyway—because the routine had become, well, routine. That surprised me. I expected the app to be a long-term crutch. But for many kids, the visual repetition was enough to internalize the order of things, and then the app became redundant.
That taught me something about habit-building in young children that I hadn’t fully understood before. The goal isn’t to make the behavior fun forever. It’s to make the behavior predictable enough that it doesn’t require thinking. For adults, a habit tracker is a way to stay accountable. For kids, it’s more like scaffolding. You build the structure, and then you quietly take it away. The child remembers that after breakfast, you brush your teeth. The app simply drew that sequence enough times for it to become a background pattern.
There are practical things we learned along the way that any parent or teacher could apply, even without an app. First, the cue has to be visual, not verbal. Telling a four-year-old “go brush your teeth” is abstract. Showing a picture of a toothbrush next to a sink, or having a physical card that represents the step, works much better. Second, keep the sequence short. Two to four steps max for young kids. Anything beyond that becomes a list of demands. Third, let the child be the one who “checks” the sequence. It’s not about completing the task; it’s about recognizing what comes next. That’s the part they need to learn.
We also learned that rewards are tricky. We initially had a system where Pebble would do a little dance every time a child finished all their steps. Some kids loved it. Others became fixated on the dance and would start crying if Pebble didn’t dance long enough. We scrapped the dance entirely. The satisfaction of actually finishing the sequence—seeing the steps fill up like a path—was enough for most kids. The exceptions were the ones who were too young to understand completion at all. For them, the app didn’t matter. They just needed a parent to guide them by hand.
Pebble is still in beta. We’ve had moments where I thought it was pointless—when a kid ignored it entirely and just did the routine anyway, or when a parent reported that their child hated the color orange and refused to open the app because Pebble was orange. We changed Pebble’s color options. We also added a feature where you can set a photo of the child’s actual socks and shoes, which sounds silly but turned out to be enormously effective. Familiarity beat generic iconography every time.
Now, months later, I’m sitting on the floor again, but this time it’s Sunday morning and there’s no rush. My son has just woken up and is patting his phone case, which has a Pebble sticker on it. He opens the app, taps “put on shoes,” and then looks at me and says, “I know how to do this. You don’t need to watch.” He puts on his shoes, gets his jacket, and stands by the door. That’s not because Pebble is brilliant. It’s because he’s heard the same sequence a hundred times. The app just happened to be one of the things that said it.
We’re still figuring out the right name for the finished version. Pebble feels right for now, but sometimes I wonder if it’s too quiet—too small for a children’s product. My niece insists it’s perfect. She says a pebble is exactly the right size. She’s probably right.
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