Build in Public
What 400 parent comments taught us about building for ADHD families
In September 2026 a photo of our family's TV travelled through ADHD and parenting groups on Facebook. These are our notes on what about 435 comments, all within a week, asked for, what we built next, and what we said "not yet" to.
The Ford family · The ADHD family of four who make FamilyOrganization.app
Published Updated 8 min read
We're the Ford family: a dad, a mom, a son and a daughter, and all four of us have ADHD. We build FamilyOrganization.app, the family organizer on the TV you already own, with an ADHD-friendly visual timeline for each person (Roku now; Apple TV, Fire TV and Google TV coming). In September 2026 a few posts about it reached a lot of parents. This is what their comments taught us, with dates. #Shipaton #BuildInPublic
We didn't plan to build in public. We planned to fix our mornings. Our family runs on ADHD time, and what helps us isn't being told about time. It's seeing it: how long until we leave, how long getting ready really takes, whose turn it is. The products built for this are wall screens that cost $149.99 to $699 (Skylight and Hearth list prices, checked 26 September 2026). We already had a big screen everyone looks at: the living-room TV. So on 1 August 2026 we started building. The full dated record is on the build-in-public page.
How did a family TV hub go viral in ADHD groups?
A phone photo of our real TV, counting down to a real departure, spread through ADHD and parenting Facebook groups in September 2026. Around 10 September, posts we'd shared in a few ADHD and parenting Facebook groups took off. One was a phone photo of our TV above the fireplace reading "LEAVE IN 07:01". Another was a screenshot of Claude adding chores to our TV, through a connector that's still in development. Facebook Insights for 29 August to 25 September 2026 shows 104,703 views and 20,178 engagements. The daily chart sits near zero until about 10 September, peaks around 19 September, and is back near zero by 22 September, so most of it happened in about ten days. The comments came even faster: about 435 including replies, within a week of our group posts on 12, 13 and 14 September (AuDHD - Chaos & Order, ADHD Parents Support Group, Parents Helping Parents with Kids with ADHD/ODD, and ADHD Awareness). We exported 388 of them from nine posts. Beta testers signed up from 12 countries: the US, the UK, Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, New Zealand, South Africa, Ireland, Pakistan, Romania, Spain and Singapore. That's where testers joined from, not where every comment came from.
The comment we think about most was short:
"I LOVE the leave in 7 minutes"
LittleMagic R., Facebook comment, September 2026
That countdown was built on 3 August for our own mornings. You can see how it works on the countdown parents asked about.
What do ADHD parents want in a family calendar?
Mostly, they wanted it to run on the devices they already have. We tagged every one of the 388 exported comments by what it asked for. The most common request was an Android app (12 comments), then a TV that isn't a Roku (6), Alexa (4) and questions about privacy (4). Feature requests were rarer: calendar sync (3), countdowns for time blindness (3) and something that works for kids who don't have phones (3). What surprised us was that most of those feature asks were already built. The iPhone app syncs the calendars on the phone, the TV shows GET READY and LEAVE IN countdowns, and kids tick off chores with the TV remote. The gap wasn't what the app does. It was where it runs. One parent put the feature side well: "I love the “get ready” and travel time blocks." (Morgan R.). Another, the same parent who loved the countdown, added: "…i love that the task just sits on the tv instead of repeatedly asking them to do something".
Here is each request next to where it stands today (September 2026):
| What parents asked for | Comments | Status today |
|---|---|---|
| Android phone app | 12 | Coming soon (written, not yet run on a device) |
| A TV that isn't a Roku | 6 | Coming soon: Fire TV, Google TV and Apple TV are in progress |
| Alexa | 4 | In development (a first version exists; not released) |
| Privacy and data safety | 4 | In beta: each family sees only its own data, and you can delete your account in the app |
| Calendar sync | 3 | In beta: one-way sync from the calendars on your iPhone |
| Countdowns for time blindness | 3 | In beta: GET READY, TRAVEL TIME and a LEAVE IN countdown on the TV |
| Works for kids without phones | 3 | In beta: kids check off chores with the TV remote |
The comments themselves, with names shortened to first name and initial, are on the community page.
What changed because of the comments?
Two changes are credited to the community in the commit messages themselves; the rest is what people asked for and what we built next. We're careful about this, because it's easy to claim every change came from the crowd.
- 15 September: overseas signups stopped failing. The signup form assumed American phone numbers, so a Dutch mobile number typed the local way became a broken "+1" number and the whole signup failed. Nobody commented about it; the signup pipeline showed it. The fix was per-country parsing and a country picker.
- 21 September: clocks. A parent wrote: "Interested in testing! In UK not sure if any issues with that?" (Chloe M.). There were issues. In one day we added a 12- or 24-hour clock, Sunday or Monday week starts and a per-TV time zone, and tested it on our TV by pretending we lived in London.
- 14 to 24 September: platforms. The beta signup started asking which TV and phone each family uses (14 September). We researched Apple TV, Google TV and Fire TV (18 September), wrote an Android version of the app and started all three TV ports (23 September), and made the backend pair any kind of TV (24 September). They're coming, not here.
- 21 September: trust. One parent wrote: "I'd be curious to know the safety behind the app and sharing information." (Ashley N.). In a privacy review that week, the AI connector we're developing lost access to the family's home address, only household admins could connect one, and every approval started being recorded.
Three lessons from 400 comments
Sort before you build
The loudest request is not the most common one. The most-reacted comment in the export suggested dropping the AI part altogether, and if we had built from reactions we might have done it. When we tagged all 388 comments, only four were about privacy. So we kept developing the AI connector, but it got stricter: it can't read the home address any more, and only an admin can switch it on. It's still in development, and AI isn't involved in the app unless you want it to be. We tagged the comments by hand, one at a time. That turned a wall of reactions into a ranked list: Android 12, other TVs 6, Alexa 4. It also showed us that the feature parents praised most, the countdown, already existed. The count pointed us at platforms rather than new features, because that is what parents had actually asked for, and it gave us a way to say why.
Watch the pipeline, not just the comments
The most important bug of the month never appeared in a comment. Families outside the US were typing their phone numbers the local way, and the form turned them into broken American numbers, so their signups failed with a generic error. Nobody wrote to say so. We found it by watching the signup pipeline, and the commit on 15 September says it plainly: real international signups were being silently lost. The same week taught us that going global means clocks. Routines and quiet hours are wall-clock times in a family's own zone, so a TV set to the wrong zone runs the morning at the wrong hour. If a second country signs up, budget for 24-hour time, Monday week starts and time zones straight away, before the first overseas family finds the problem for you.
Say "not yet" out loud, with the reason
People asked for iPad. The first release is iPhone-only, because an iPad build with portrait-only screens fails App Store upload validation, and we'd rather ship something that works than something that's rejected. A first version of the Alexa skill was built by 8 August, but it has never run on a real Echo, and Amazon's rules block the reminders its announcements need outside a live Alexa session. So it's "in development", and the app hides it for now. Rewards for kids, a kids app and screen-time tools are on the list but not built. We've learned that a limit you explain reads very differently from one people discover. Saying "not yet, and here's why" costs one sentence. Letting a parent find it after they've set up the whole family costs their trust.
What comes next, honestly labelled
As of September 2026, FamilyOrganization.app is in beta on iPhone and Roku. Android, Fire TV, Google TV and Apple TV are coming soon, and the Alexa skill and the Claude and ChatGPT connector are in development. Rewards, a kids app and screen-time tools are planned. Calendar sync is one-way, from the calendars on your iPhone, and there's no photo frame. Pricing will be announced at launch.
- To see which TVs and phones it runs on today, read which TVs it runs on.
- To see how each person's day looks on the TV, read about everyone's day on one screen.
- To see how a TV you own compares with buying a wall screen, read how it compares with Skylight and Hearth.
The build stays public after Shipaton: the dated timeline, every request and what happened to it, and what we get wrong next. If you run a family on ADHD time, we'd love more testers.
Numbers and sources: views and engagements from Facebook Insights, 29 August to 25 September 2026. Comment counts from the 388 exported comments (about 435 including replies, all within about a week of the 12 September group posts). Dates are commit dates from the project's git history. Quotes are verbatim; names are shortened to first name and initial.