Picky-eater tracker for parents
The idea
Around a quarter to a third of toddlers go through significant picky-eating phases, and the standard clinical advice — repeated low-pressure exposure, sometimes 10–15 times per food — is exactly the kind of thing an app can track and a stressed parent can’t. Existing baby apps focus on milk feeds and weaning schedules for infants; the 2–6-year-old picky-eater niche is oddly empty.
Who pays
Parents, at the peak-anxiety moment when their pediatrician says “he’s fine, just keep offering foods.” One-time purchase beats subscription here — parents are subscription-fatigued and the problem is temporary. $12.99 once, no account, privacy-first (it’s data about a child — make local-only a headline feature, not a limitation).
MVP scope
- 5-second meal logging with the three-outcome model
- Food explorer grid + exposure counts
- Rule-based pattern callouts and weekly suggestion (no server, no LLM)
- One-time unlock via RevenueCat
- Skip for v1: multi-child, caregiver sync, photo logging, recipes
Build Bitesized: a mobile app for parents of picky eaters, using Expo (React Native + TypeScript) with expo-sqlite for fully local storage. Core loop — logging must take under 5 seconds: from the home screen, tap a meal (breakfast/lunch/dinner/snack), tap foods from a recent-foods grid (plus search over a built-in food list with emoji icons), then for each food tap one of three outcomes: ate it / tried it / refused. That's the whole log flow. Insights screen: a "food explorer" grid showing every food ever offered, colored by current status (accepted / warming up / refused / not offered recently), a streak of "new foods tried this month", and pattern callouts computed locally with simple rules — e.g. "Crunchy foods get accepted 3x more than soft ones" (tag foods with texture/food-group metadata in the built-in list) or "Broccoli has been refused 4x — research suggests 10-15 exposures; try again in a low-pressure way next week." Include a weekly "try this" suggestion: pick one refused-but-not-recently- offered food adjacent (same texture or flavor family) to something accepted. Design: warm, calm, zero guilt. Never scores the child; frames everything as exposure counts, because repeated exposure is the evidence-based mechanism. All data on-device; a one-time $12.99 unlock (RevenueCat) after a 14-day full-featured trial. No accounts, no ads, no tracking — state this prominently.
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