christalwang

we love blunt and critical, it's why these forums are so important for us. totally hear you on these, and some other folks here have mentioned similar comments. we'll be looking at our landing page further over the next week! thanks! and also agree time = money, with you on that one. appreciate the feedback

thanks for this feedback - curious what current assistive technologies you use right now? totally agree on complementing our challenges, and there are definitely a lot of apps that do pieces of it (we have some of these features on our roadmap to integrate in) but what we've found through coaching and our members is that a big part of their barrier to reaching the life they want is around self worth, noticing wins / patterns in little wins over time, and coming up with / remembering strategies across different life areas. the goal here is not to choose one or the other but to support both types of needs

Some really good stuff in here. - on testimonials. We have some early ones here https://testimonial.to/indy/all and a bunch of video ones that include the good and the bad (but not shared for privacy). i do like the idea of sharing all of it in a live place so people can engage though. something we'll look into - community building is huge for us. i'm on IG with 200K+ and we constantly throw free community events (live), e.g. last week we did a 2026 planning with 1,000+ ADHDers there - we’re also looking to include thumbs up/down around messages similar to other ai chat apps so people can provide more feedback around specific messages/outputs and for each chat interaction too! any other ideas welcome :)

Appreciate this!

It's free!

Glad you found the system that works for you! Not an easy feat and not many folks have gotten there. And thanks for sharing your exact system, no doubt it'll help people here. The doodles you're seeing is probably for our other product and social media. The new Indy app has a celestial theme in dark mode, and we'll likely make other modes later! For a lot of our members, they've noted that the calming nature of it helps them settle into a reflective state (vs. our coaching app is more bright and uplifting!).

The app is for 18+ only, currently! (but we do have a coaching program specifically built for teens between 13-17 y/o if you're interested in the future!)

Fair, feedback heard from multiple people here on: being more direct, concrete, credible. I'll take this back for the next iteration of the landing page!

I'm sorry you had a poor experience! 2022 was the year I got diagnosed and the app definitely wasn't nearly as good as it is now, and I'm sorry you went through those bugs. But more importantly, I'm sorry about the experience you had with your coach. We take these flags really seriously and since then, we've put in several rounds of guardrails in the hiring process, with ongoing contract renewals with our coaches, and general culture & training. Now, we only take <3.5% of qualified coaches and have far more processes in place to make sure these things don't happen and catch them if they slip through. Because we don't record the sessions or supervise them because of privacy, there definitely has been a few situations like yours and again, we do take them really seriously! We do have hundreds if not thousands of really impactful stories and progress (I've personally cried in multiple feedback calls) so if anyone is reading this, I highly recommend checking out this page too! https://testimonial.to/shimmer-care/all

Hahaha, I'm a millennial and that still resonates with me, so I get it. I think within every community there's always a really big span and hopefully our new product experience can be helpful to a subset of that span! With the AI chats, it's substantially more personalized and less restrictive than last gen text box flows!

Appreciate the thought behind this comment, and the willingness to help with the questions we asked! We actually just came out of beta last week, so the data is skewed. Beta users have really high usage & retention rates (probably due to the accountability that they knew they'd be talking to me on the phone at the end, and since they applied and committed to testing).

Interesting thought behind using 1) force and 2) consequences to get tasks done. I think those are definitely 2 useful levers, but there are other levers to get these things done too (of course, without context to what tasks you're referring to). On Indy, we use positive motivation & emotional salience to help users connect their current task to future goals, we help them explore if there's a gap of [capability], [opportunity], or [motivation] to get something done (COM-B model), and help them draw on past strategies that have worked for them that they may have forgot (non-exhaustive). Indy is intentionally not a to-do list, there's actually no lists in there, as lists get overwhelming, but instead helps the users cut down and reflect on what's really important today or this week to get to your life goals (existential productivity vs. traditional productivity).

I like your line of thinking at the end there. A lot of our members come in thinking they want better organization / productivity / habits, or in general just MORE, but we know through research that that doesn't actually yield a more fruitful life. And yes haha, no shortcuts in life, but I try to enjoy the process :)

Thanks, appreciate you! Agree that some folks here likely have put together their own systems too, so I was also hoping to get some inspiration from what folks have done and what's working for them! And I also know this group will be the most critical (in a good way) so it's always helpful for us to launch here as it makes our product and systems better.

If there's anyone in your life who's earlier on in their journey, do send Indy their way!

re: Non-medical use, Indy doesn't give advice, diagnose, treat, or interpret symptoms. We don’t tell people what they SHOULD do. We focus on reflection, structuring thoughts, noticing patterns, and helping users orient themselves, so that they build autonomy and capacity over time. E.g. generic LLMs don't often have tight guardrails and they can drift into prescriptive or quasi-clinical territory simply because that’s what users ask for.

Nice, let us know how that goes.

lol

And just to add, I also have the justice sensitivity! Because of that, even our other service (ADHD coaching) has all the prices VERY clearly on the home page. It includes the monthly price in big font and a clear summary of what's included in each package. https://www.shimmer.care/

A few things top of mind:

1) A big differentiation is the guidance. Indy is based on science-backed frameworks and exercises that set the foundation for and fuel the main scaffolding interactions. For example, by going through the lifeline exercise when you sign up, members are prompted to think of future events across different life areas (vs. often when you tackle this yourself you may just start working on productivity/work oriented things for example) and the objective function of the app is general well-being rather than productivity

2) Indy is built not to give you answers but to build your capacity. For example, in the problem solving agent, it teaches you the COM-B framework through demonstration, and I've already talked to many members who are surprised that they found themselves going through similar thought process even when Indy wasn't there and getting things done that they haven't been able to in months or years

3) Sounds trivial but the design and user experience. It's built for ADHD and although not perfect and there's tons we want to add, the app is trained to help you see the good (pulling out wins, surfacing it in pretty ways, allowing you to add photos to build salience, etc.) to build self trust over time; and other UI / illustration choices to provide some dopamine (and we've considered hard the balance between providing dopamine but not trying to just get people to return to the app for the sake of it)

I just wanted to clarify, this app is COMPLETELY FREE. There is no cost.

The cost you're seeing is for our other product that includes live body doubling (co-working) sessions that are guided by our ADHD coaches. I think I might remove that link or move it to the bottom. Sorry for the confusion!

I totally hear you that there are so many products in the market that only work for the person who designed them. We designed this with hundreds of beta users (I had 5-6 deep calls per day for at least a month) and it's based off of our learnings from our 50+ adhd coaches and thousands of adhd coaching clients as well. As we build this out more, we have deeper personalization of how the app works planned too, so hopefully we'll be able to serve (not all but) many ADHDers! I'm always curious about what people build on their own though, and what about Indy wasn't fit for them. This helps us figure out what adaptability to build going forward! But if you have a system that works well for you already, that's amazing!

And hear you on that copy! We tested it with our beta community and it was based off of thousands of ADHDers main sentiment & challenge. Here are the top ones if you're curious: “I’m stuck and something has to change”; “I don’t trust myself anymore”; “I want direction, not another to-do list”; “I want to work with my ADHD, not fight it”; we'll be continuing to test this as we talk to more users!

sorry that it hasn't been done yet! we generally attend to these pretty quickly. If you sent it to support, it may have been buried. I can look into it though. Can you send an email to privacy@shimmer.care?

For now, here's the app store links if you want to access it from your laptop!

for apple: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/indy-your-adhd-copilot/id67543...

for google: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.shimmer.co...

Good point, we didn't consider that people would want to browse the app store from their laptop. We'll look into this today!

Perhaps try to go directly into the app store, I think that copy and the screenshots is a lot more straight forward. Our care team has skewed the landing page to be a bit more of "show the benefit" rather than the functionality (since a lot of the functionality looks like chat bots) but we can definitely take another look through it and I love the idea of including a demo! For now, the youtube demo is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDSDxyXv6i4

Glad to hear you've built a system that works for you! We've also heard from a lot of our beta users that they've tried to cobble together something similar, and a lot of their feedback and ideas is what we used to build this initial version (in collaboration with our Research Lab to integrate the latest methods too). Many of them weren't able to push their self-built systems over the finish line or maintain it, due to ADHD challenges though. Our goal is to build a flexible enough system that it can be adapted for various learning styles (in practice we're still far off from where we want to be) and continue building agents on top of it that make science-backed exercises and methods more accessible. A lot of the best practices are currently gated behind long textbooks and scattered PDF worksheets so I'm really excited about making this more accessible. For example, this week we're working on an "energy accounting" agent that's widely used (in varying formats) across ADHD practitioners that many ADHDers know they want to do theoretically but haven't found the way to follow through on it.

I love the weekly self review and planning practice you mention; I do a similar one with myself and my co-founder each week and have started moving that process into Indy recently!

There's a little button inside the profile page to discover our ADHD coaching service (1:1 coaching with one of our 50+ expert ADHD coaches). Right now we don't push it explicitly but have already seen folks explore it. Indy is meant to be an accessible form of support for those who can't afford coaching or are in between coaching seasons, or even use it with their coaching experience. We also advertise our free community events (last week we hosted a 2026 planning workshop with 1,000+ participants) and in those events, often folks also discover 1:1 coaching and will join thereafter. We're also exploring what integrating the core Indy features into 1:1 coaching looks like but doing so carefully with the feedback of members and our coaches, so in the future it may be one app with multiple tiers!

A few main differences: 1) it moves you towards things that matter to you. E.g. not open prompts but helping you break down each week and day to move you closer to your future events you envision; 2) it uses science-back methods (like COM-B) to help you solve challenges in your life; 3) it remembers when things worked / haven't worked for you so that when you bring them up in the future it can support you with personalized solutions rather than just answering what's the "best solution". We're also working on the next phase of agents which include energy accounting, values-discovery, strengths-discovery, habit building, and more.

No, it's 100% free! www.shimmer.care/indy-redirect (or search "ADHD Indy" on app store)

You might be heading to our community service on our main website, which is a different one (live body doubling, etc.)

Good luck on your diagnosis. How is that like in Norway?

Yes, ADHD coaching has been studied and outcomes have been proven. Experts like Russell Barkley also recommend it. The challenge isn't coaching as a modality, but rather the sparseness in quality across the whole coaching field since it's not a protected term. At Shimmer, our coaches are vetted, trained, and supervised, and practice evidence-based methodologies that have been designed in partnership with our clinical partners.

We also track outcomes. - 83% of Shimmer ADHD coaching members self report better ability to manage their symptoms after 6 weeks. - Shimmer members improve their BDEFS scores (Executive Functioning Skills) by 12% over a 3 month coaching period. - Shimmer members reduce their BFIS scores (Life impairment across key life domains) by 17% over a 3 month coaching period.

Yes, 100%. A lot of the design decisions are subtle but solve a pain point and make things easier and more delightful to use. We need every little bit of help to make sure we show up to and work through these sessions.

I've also used non-ADHD therapists and other healthcare providers and it's always tough if they're not neuro-affirming. Especially before I was diagnosed and couldn't even put my finger on what was wrong.

I love that! I've never heard of that website but I can completely imagine it. I used to do the same thing in libraries and even mall foodcourts.

And just to clarify, our service is not $140/hour. It's $140 per month, which includes 4 video sessions with your coach and unlimited use of body doubling and other features. Body doubling is not the main offering, it's more of an ancillary product to support our coaching members!