Built by a teacher, for real classrooms

Last year in my Wellbeing course at REAL School Budapest, students studied how their minds and bodies actually work. We explored how social media is designed to hijack attention — the dopamine spikes and crashes, the infinite scroll, the notification anxiety. We learned the basics of neuroplasticity and how repeated behaviours reshape the brain over time.

Then we tried to do something about it.

Students moved from SMART goals to smart habit design — creating specific plans to take charge of their own wellbeing. Sleep, movement, focus, connection. I did it alongside them. I hit my own goal that year: deadlifting 90kg.

The habit design worked. The tracking didn't.

I had 20 students, each with their own Google Sheet. It was a mess. Manually checking progress was tedious. Calculating streaks was error-prone. Worst of all, students couldn't see each other's journeys — and that visibility is where the real motivation lives. When you know others are struggling and showing up too, it changes things. When an educator tracks habits alongside their students, it stops being an assignment. It becomes something we're all doing together.

The tools that existed didn't fit. Consumer habit apps were designed for individuals, not classrooms. School wellness platforms focused on surveys and compliance, not student agency. Nothing combined the science of behaviour change with the power of doing it in community.

So I decided to build it.

I'm not an app developer. I use AI tools to help me code, and I figure things out as I go. Strive is built to meet a real need I couldn't solve any other way.

What matters most to me is the connection — the conversations that happen because we can see how each other is doing. That's where the magic is. Students noticing a classmate's streak. Checking in when someone falls off. An educator sharing that they missed a day too. This builds belonging and psychological safety. That's not a feature. That's the whole point.

My vision is to build communities where we strive together to become our best selves.

Habits are a form of self-care — small ways of investing in your future self. Technology should help people need it less over time. The goal isn't to keep students in the app. It's to help them become the kind of person who doesn't need it.

That's what I'm trying to build.