I’m Tanya Aulachynskaya. I build products for a living, and I’m the mom of an 11-year-old daughter who needs a lot of attention. Starday started as something I needed in my own house.
Work and being a mom
I’m a product manager. I’ve worked in product at PandaDoc, where I was VP of Product, and at Metabase and RevenueCat. I work remotely from Warsaw.
I’m also a mom. My daughter is 11 and needs a lot of attention, and I have work commitments that don’t move. A lot of my day is trying to fit those two things together.
Mornings were me, repeating myself
Every school morning had the same shape. "Get dressed." "Teeth." "Teeth, please." "Where are your shoes?" I would be answering a message with one hand and checking she had her bag with the other, and by the time she was out of the door we were both tired and slightly annoyed with each other. The routine wasn’t hers. It lived in my head, and my voice was the alarm clock.
I knew the advice — make it visible, let her own it — and it is the advice I have since written up in our guide to mornings without nagging. Knowing it and doing it at 7:45 on a Tuesday are different things.
The screen-time wall
Then there was the screen. I did what you are supposed to do: set up the built-in limits, the downtime, the app timers. What I got was a daily standoff. The limit would hit in the middle of something, she would be furious, I would be the bad guy, and half the time she had already found a way around it. The guardrails were working against us instead of for us — every limit was a wall she ran into, and every wall was a fight with me.
What I want is the opposite: screen time as something she earns by getting her routine done, rather than a wall she keeps hitting. Starday doesn’t unlock screen time yet — that one is still on my list.
The apps that were supposed to help
So I tried the kids’ routine and chore apps. Some were fine. Some I wouldn’t give to my kid. The one that bothered me most was Joon: its onboarding leaned hard on parental guilt to get me to pay before I had seen anything, and the app itself pulled my daughter into a pet game that had very little to do with the chores it was supposed to be about. I wrote up what I found, as a parent, in an honest review of Joon and its alternatives.
So I built what I wanted
Starday is the app I couldn’t find. The rules I built it around are simple:
- She runs her own day. Her routine is a short list of quests on her own device, and she checks them off herself.
- The reward lands the moment the task is done. No approval step waiting on a parent who is on a call.
- I set the rewards. Stars buy things from a rewards shop I control.
- No guilt, no dark patterns. No onboarding that tells you you’re failing your child unless you subscribe.
- The routine is the point. No game bolted on top that becomes the real reason to open the app.
What our days look like now
Her list isn’t long or impressive, and that is the point. These are the everyday things she has started doing on her own, as quests:
- Brushing her teeth in the evening. This is the big win. Evening teeth used to be the hardest thing on the list to get done; now it is a quest she ticks off herself before bed.
- Unloading the dishwasher. A real household job, not a pretend one.
- Cleaning up her room. Not fully, but it’s getting better.
- Taking her vitamins.
- Eating healthy food. An apple a day keeps the doctor away :)
She knew how to do every one of these. She just didn’t want to, so I’d end up standing over her repeating myself. Now they’re on her list, and ticking them off earns her stars.
It isn’t magic, and it doesn’t replace being there. But it took me out of the role of human alarm clock, and that turned out to be most of what I wanted.
What I read along the way
While building Starday I read a lot of the research on kids with ADHD and kids on the autism spectrum, and a lot of how the app works comes from it. I put it all in one place: the research behind Starday, with what each study found and what it changed in the app.
Say hello
If you try Starday, I would genuinely like to hear what works and what doesn’t. You can find me on X and LinkedIn.
— Tanya
Try it in your house
Starday is free to try on iPhone, Android and the web. One family code syncs every device.
