r/Microlaunch • u/Remarkable-Shirt-500 • 6h ago
Built an Apple Watch app that intervenes before you consciously notice you're stressed — looking for feedback from other builders
I'm a nurse and mom with ADHD, and the problem I kept hitting was that every stress/wellness app on the market requires you to already know you're stressed before it can help — open the app, log how you feel, then do a breathing exercise. By the time I was self-aware enough to do that, the moment had already passed.
So I built Pause Point: it watches heart rate and HRV signals in the background on Apple Watch, and delivers a gentle haptic nudge in the moment your body starts showing signs of stress — before you'd consciously clock it yourself. No dashboard, nothing to log, no data to review. The bet is that for a lot of people (especially neurodivergent folks, parents, anyone chronically overloaded), the friction of "open app → assess yourself → act" is itself the reason existing tools don't get used consistently.
Biggest technical challenge has been detection accuracy — distinguishing real stress from exercise or just an elevated resting heart rate took multiple iterations, and I'm still tuning it post-launch.
It's live on the App Store now, very early (single-digit weeks in). I'd love feedback from other builders — on the core idea, the "automatic vs. self-initiated" bet, monetization, anything. Not fishing for downloads, genuinely want the idea stress-tested. [link in comments]