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Impulse — Content Push Playbook

August 2026 – March 2027

Goal: 2,500+ emails and 250+ paid reservations before the Kickstarter launches on 1 March 2027. Hard gate: checked 2027-02-14. If you don't have those numbers plus one creator video that visibly outperformed, don't launch. Early gate: GATE-TRAJECTORY — 600 emails by 2026-11-30. Not a launch decision; a hook decision.

Rescheduled 2026-08-21. The campaign moved from early November 2026 to 1 March 2027 and the ship date to September 2027 — a twenty-seven-week run-up instead of twelve — because school and the day job took the hours the original assumed. vault/Timeline.md is the operational copy and carries the dated windows, the milestone IDs and the phased advertising budget. Everything in this playbook still applies; the rates came down and the sequence stretched. The one thing that genuinely got better is §4's power post — see the note there.

0. The One Rule

Sunrise Lock is the product. Everything below is either a version of Sunrise Lock, a reason to care about Sunrise Lock, or the engineering story behind it.

When something works, make forty more of it. The failure mode is variety — founders make 100 different videos instead of 100 versions of the one that hit.

The claims fence (memorise before filming)

  • Shoot on a motor-enabled unit. Never show vibration and the LED ring working on the same unit.
  • Never say impossible to cheat, unbeatable, can't be bypassed → hard to beat on impulse
  • The anchor locks its own strap, never the watch or the wearer
  • Anchor backup battery ≈ 1 hour today. Never imply indefinite.
  • Watch runs 8–12 hours. Never imply multi-day.
  • No app-blocking, no uninstall detection. Both were cut.
  • No medical claims, ever.
  • Lead with the freedom, not the buzzing.

1. Month-by-Month

Late August – September 2026 — Restart and instrument

The assets that were already open, on windows that are actually reachable. Nothing here is new work.

By Priority
Aug 31 Install site analytics — ten minutes, and every number below is unmeasurable without it. Email capture's UTM acceptance test run. Footage off the camera onto a disk.
Sep 7 Hackaday.io project page created, first two logs. Stand up the blog — §4's submissions all require it and there isn't one.
Sep 20 Founder video published.
Sep 30 Kickstarter pre-launch page live.
from Aug 24 Begin posting 2×/week. Not 3 — see §11.

Parallel non-content work: two Fanstel conversations opened now (scope their open BM20C filing; start the WM02C change-of-ID), three lab quotes.

October – November 2026 — Build in public, and actually build

This is the stretch the old plan never had: engineering time between the boards arriving and the campaign. The content and the engineering are the same work.

  • 2 posts/week through October, 3/week from November
  • Board V1 bring-up, with enough calendar for the power-tree failure to appear — it takes days, not one demonstration. Draw and order the respin.
  • First HN attempt in October — Show HN, the framing post (§4)
  • Second HN in November — the ESP32→nRF power post, which now has measured numbers behind it for the first time
  • Hackaday.io logs, one per fortnight
  • 10 creator emails/week
  • Second YouTube long-form
  • First newsletter and podcast pitches
  • GATE-TRAJECTORY check, Nov 30: 600 emails. Miss it and change the hook, not the volume.

December 2026 – January 2027 — Convert

Dec 19 – Jan 3 is deliberately light. Creator outreach doesn't land, newsletters don't run, attention is elsewhere. Plan around it rather than failing against it.

  • Open $15 refundable reservations (1 Dec — but read Timeline.md first, the nine-month hold is a live problem)
  • Paid creator placements: 5–8, $300–800 each. The whole of BUD-ADS's creator line, bought as data on which framing converts, and the only reliable route to GATE-CREATOR
  • 3 posts/week; creator emails up to 20/week
  • Hackaday tip line pitch #1 (December), #2 (January)
  • Third HN post (January)
  • Newsletter and podcast placements run in January — the highest-intent month of the year for this subject
  • Hackaday.io logs back to weekly from January
  • Settle MOQ and tier pricing before February — Chinese New Year is 6 Feb 2027

February 2027 — Concentrate and pre-launch

  • Whatever won, do only that. 5 posts/week.
  • Retargeting spend, $500–1,500. Never cold.
  • Campaign assets final; tiers locked at six
  • Pre-scan on deposit money — the one certification item worth paying for before the campaign
  • Final week: pre-launch page push, "we launch in 10 days" sequence to the list
  • Gate check 2027-02-14. Two weeks before launch, so "no" is still a decision.

March 2027 — Campaign

  • All traffic to Kickstarter. No exceptions for 30 days.
  • Daily posting, campaign-native content (funding milestones, stretch goals, backer questions)
  • Press follow-ups to everyone who didn't reply in Nov–Jan — a live campaign is a news hook that a pre-launch isn't
  • Book the FCC lab slot mid-March, once it is visibly funding

2. Short-Form Video Ideas

Vertical, 7–20 seconds unless noted. No text overlay on the master cuts so creators can reuse them.

Sunrise Lock (your workhorse — expect 60% of output)

  1. POV: 6am, dark room, the anchor across the room starts sounding. Cut before resolution.
  2. The snooze that isn't — reaching for a phone, tapping, nothing stops.
  3. Putting the watch on → the room goes quiet → grace countdown on screen.
  4. Grace period expires while still in bed → watch and anchor together, escalating.
  5. Setting it the night before. "This is me at 11pm deciding for me at 6am."
  6. One week of wake-ups, time-lapsed, same camera position.
  7. Trying to muffle the anchor under a pillow → servo lock, it won't move.
  8. Unplugging the anchor mid-alarm → it keeps going on battery. (State the ~1hr limit if the caption gets specific.)
  9. Roommate/partner reaction shot the first morning.
  10. "I tried to beat my own alarm" — montage of failed attempts, honest about the ones that worked.
  11. Silent version: just the LED ring, the room, and the timing. Let text carry it.
  12. Placing the anchor across the house vs next to the bed — "how hard do you want to make this?"
  13. The anchor beeping when you tap it in the app, for identification.
  14. Same setup filmed in five different bedrooms.

Phone-distance commitments

  1. Docking the phone on the kitchen anchor at 6:30. Walking away.
  2. Reaching for the phone during a window → 60-second tolerance → alarm.
  3. The tolerance demo: quick text check, put it back, nothing happens.
  4. Side-by-side: uninstalling an app blocker (easy) vs walking back to the kitchen (annoying).
  5. A morning with a phone window vs without. Split screen, same person.
  6. "I don't block your apps. I keep the phone out of your hands."

The trust architecture (your tech-audience hooks)

  1. Taking the watch off mid-commitment → anchors take over. The hand-off is the whole story.
  2. Winding the watch clock forward → nothing ages, nothing ends.
  3. Editing the schedule to loosen a window → "takes effect tomorrow."
  4. Deleting the app entirely → still enforced.
  5. Spending an emergency pass. Then trying to grant yourself more → day-delayed.
  6. "The adversary is me in four hours." 15-second explainer over b-roll.
  7. The hard override demo — hold both buttons, everything stops. Publish this one. It preempts the coercion narrative better than any statement.

Build-in-public

  1. Servo locking the strap, macro, bench lighting.
  2. IR skin sensor: the invisible pulse, the reading, ambient subtracted.
  3. Always-on LED ring at 12 positions, close up.
  4. PCB reveal / first bring-up.
  5. Enclosure iterations lined up oldest to newest.
  6. The failed prototypes drawer.
  7. Anchor teardown — servo, speaker, PSU, backup cell.
  8. Soldering ASMR with a caption about what it's for.

Problem-first (no product, or product only at the end)

  1. "Things I've promised myself at 6am that were lies."
  2. Time blindness, explained in 20 seconds.
  3. The three-hour scroll you didn't choose.
  4. Why habit apps fail: nothing happens when you ignore them.
  5. Odysseus and the mast — the 2,700-year-old version of this product.
  6. "You don't need more motivation. You need to stop having the argument."
  7. The gap between intention and action, named precisely enough that people tag friends.

Formats worth testing

  • Silent + text-carried — high completion rate, works without sound
  • First-person, one continuous take — reads as real, not produced
  • The reversal — set up "this seems excessive," pay off with "here's my week"
  • Direct-to-camera answer to a hostile comment — best-performing format you'll find; farm the comments for it

3. Understanding The Two Hackadays

These are separate things and people conflate them constantly.

Hackaday.io is a project-hosting site. You create a project page and post build logs. There is no such thing as over-posting here — post thirty logs, post every dead end. Followers accumulate, and each log notifies them. This is where all your build content lives.

Hackaday.com is the editorial blog with a very large readership. You don't post there; writers pick stories. They actively trawl Hackaday.io looking for material, which means good .io logs are themselves the pitch. You can also email the tip line directly.

Hackaday culture

The audience is engineers, hobbyists, and people who have personally fought a bad datasheet. What they value:

  • Process over product. The journey is the content. "Here's what I tried, here's what failed, here's the oscilloscope trace" is the ideal shape.
  • Specific numbers. Current draw in µA. Actual measured values. Vague claims get shredded in the comments.
  • Admitted failure. Publishing a mistake earns more credibility here than any success.
  • Doing it the hard way. Custom solutions are respected even when an off-the-shelf part existed.

What gets you savaged: anything that reads like a press release, marketing adjectives, hidden commercial intent, hand-waving over the hard parts. The comment section is famously blunt and pedantic — treat it as free design review rather than criticism. Answer technically, concede when someone's right, never get defensive.

One norm to respect: be upfront that this is a commercial product. Hackaday readers don't mind commercial projects at all; they mind being marketed to without being told. A single line — "this is going to be a product, here's the engineering" — buys you complete goodwill.

Your logs, sequenced

Post one per fortnight through December, weekly from January (revised 2026-08-21 — see §11). Roughly 400–1,200 words with photos, scope traces, or measurements. Volume here is free and the site rewards it; the fortnightly rate is about your hours, not about Hackaday.io.

  1. What Impulse is, and why the phone can't be the enforcer (framing; state the commercial intent here)
  2. ESP32 → nRF: the migration, with power numbers — see §5 for why this is also your best HN post
  3. Choosing the radio modules; what got rejected and why
  4. Reflective IR skin sensing on a budget — pulsing, ambient subtraction, false positives
  5. The always-on LED analog clock and its power budget
  6. The proximity engine, part 1: what "which room am I in" actually costs
  7. Proximity, part 2: RSSI is a liar — filtering, hysteresis, the failure cases
  8. Proximity, part 3: how we landed on fail-open, and what it costs us
  9. The motor and LED ring sharing a pin, how it happened, how the next board fixes it
  10. The servo strap lock — mechanism, failure modes, what a determined person can still defeat
  11. Post-processing 3D prints so they don't look 3D printed — full process, materials, before/afters
  12. Anchor local schedule persistence and midnight recomputation
  13. Anchor WiFi self-repair: credential re-sharing from the charging watch, scoped so a stranger can't phish it
  14. Elapsed-time timers vs wall clock — what happens when someone winds the clock forward
  15. The hard override, and the safety reasoning behind it
  16. Enclosure iterations, and what wearing it for three months taught me
  17. FCC pre-scan results — what failed, what changed
  18. Wrapping up: what I'd do differently on a ten-month build

Tip line

Email tips@hackaday.com. Four sentences, one photo, one link to the project page. Pitch once in December and once in January (moved 2026-08-21 from September/October), with your two strongest standalone stories — most likely the ESP32→nRF power saga and the 3D print finishing process. Don't pitch the product; pitch the technique.

Also worth doing: enter the Hackaday Prize if the timing lines up. Contest entries get editorial coverage and cost nothing.

4. Hacker News — And Yes, There Is Such A Thing As Over-Posting

Your instinct here is the one thing I'd most want to correct. More posts is not better on HN; it's actively harmful.

Why

  • Show HN is once per project. Not once per milestone. One.
  • Domain throttling is real. HN's software penalizes domains that appear repeatedly from the same submitter. Five submissions from impulse.com in two months and your sixth quietly doesn't appear on /new at all.
  • Repetition reads as marketing. The community is unusually good at spotting someone using HN as a distribution channel, and the response is flagging, not downvoting. Flagged posts die in minutes.
  • The payoff is wildly non-linear. One front-page post is worth 1,000–3,000 emails. Five posts that stall on /new are worth approximately zero. You are not accumulating; you are buying lottery tickets, and the ticket quality is what matters.

Budget: 4 posts across the whole seven months (2026-08-21 — the cap did not rise with the runway; the spacing improved a lot, four across seven months instead of four across four). That's it. Everything else you want to write goes on Hackaday.io and your own blog, where volume is free.

⚠️ You do not have a blog. The site has eight routes and none of them is one, and every rule below depends on submitting your own domain. That is SEP-11 and it is due 2026-09-07 — none of the four posts can be spent until it exists.

What makes an HN post work

The test: would this be interesting to someone who will never buy your product? If the answer is no, it's a product announcement and it will die.

  • Systems-level tradeoffs, not feature descriptions
  • Real numbers. "Current draw went from 4.2mA to 380µA" is the post. "Better battery life" is not.
  • A decision with a loser. You chose nRF and rejected ESP32. Explain what you gave up.
  • Titles: declarative, specific, no hype. Mods rewrite editorialized titles. Never "How I built the ultimate..." — instead "Migrating a wearable from ESP32 to nRF52 for a 10× power reduction."
  • No asking for anything. No upvote requests anywhere on the internet, no "please check out," no mailing list plug above the fold. A link in the footer is fine.

Your four posts, allocated

October 2026 — Show HN (framing).

Show HN: Impulse – a commitment device where the adversary is my future self

The architecture post: why the enforcer can't live on the device being policed, the watch as root of trust, tightenings instant and loosenings quarantined, elapsed-time timers, fail-open, anchor hand-off. Say plainly what you cut and why. Include the repo if any of it is public.

November 2026 — the power post.

Migrating a wearable from ESP32 to nRF52: what it cost and what it bought

This is your strongest single piece of material and you should treat it as such. Power-budget migrations with real measurements are perennial HN front-page fare, it's completely independent of whether anyone cares about your product, and it demonstrates competence better than any claim. Include the numbers that made the decision, the things nRF made harder, and what you'd do differently.

2026-08-21 — this is the post the new timeline improves, and it is worth saying plainly. It was scheduled for September 2026, when no nRF firmware existed, no board had been brought up, and not one power number had been measured. The paragraph above says in its own words that it needs real measured numbers, and it would not have had any. Moving it to November puts it after Board V1 bring-up, which is the work that produces them. The single strongest asset in the plan went from unwritable to evidenced.

January 2027 — pick one.

RSSI is a liar: two months of building a room-level proximity engine Fail-open: designing an alarm that would rather miss than false-alarm Putting safety limits in firmware because the app will be forked

The proximity saga is probably the best of these — it's a hard problem, everyone who's touched BLE has been burned by it, and a long honest write-up of the dead ends is exactly the genre. The safety-limits post is the most unusual and would do well if written specifically rather than sanctimoniously.

Post-campaign (April/May 2027).

Open-sourcing the firmware for a self-binding wearable What 500 backers taught us about FCC certification

Mechanics

  • Tuesday–Thursday, 8–10am ET
  • Publish on your own blog, submit that URL. It builds one domain's reputation rather than scattering, and gives you the canonical home for everything.
  • Be in the comments for four straight hours. Non-negotiable. Engagement in the first hour determines whether it climbs.
  • Expect "this is dystopian" and "I'd defeat this in five minutes." Answer both once, calmly, with the self-binding frame and the hard override. Concede the bypasses that actually work — conceding wins the thread.
  • Never mention votes, never complain about flagging.
  • Let other people submit sometimes. If a reader submits your Hackaday.io log, that's a submission with none of the self-promotion cost. You can't ask for this, but posting good work makes it happen.

Lobsters deserves separate, quieter submissions of the same technical posts. Smaller, more technical, invite-only, and a good place for the deeper material.

5. Routing Your Ten Months Of Stories

You have far more material than outlets. Route by fit rather than posting everything everywhere. The pattern: one story, adapted across three formats — not three different stories.

Story HN Hackaday YouTube Notes
ESP32 → nRF migration Yes — the September post .io log + tip line 10–15 min deep dive Your best single asset. Needs real measurements.
Proximity engine saga Yes — October candidate 3-part .io series 12 min, scope footage Too big for one post; serialise on .io
3D print post-processing No — too narrow for HN Yes — best tip line pitch Yes — broadest appeal of anything you have Evergreen search traffic, huge audience beyond your product
Servo strap lock No .io log + tip line Short Very filmable
IR skin sensing No .io log Short or segment
Pin-share mistake No Yes — .io, publish it Segment in a build video Failure content earns the audience
Fail-open design October candidate .io log Segment
Safety limits in firmware October candidate .io log Standalone video Unusual, high-signal
FCC certification process Post-campaign .io log 12 min Genuinely under-documented; would do well
Anchor WiFi self-repair No .io log Segment Neat trick, narrow appeal

The 3D print post-processing piece is your sleeper. It has nothing to do with commitment devices, which is exactly why it will travel furthest — it's a technique thousands of people search for, it's evergreen, and it brings in makers who then discover the project. Give it real production effort.

6. YouTube — Honest Assessment Of The Technical Content

Short answer: make it, but not as your March funnel.

The case against, first: technical build content is slow. It doesn't compound inside twelve weeks, the audience takes months to accumulate, and if you're measuring it on emails-by-March it will look like a failure. Do not let it displace the short-form work or the Hackaday.io logs.

2026-08-21 — this section's own argument now cuts the other way, partially. Twenty-seven weeks is not twelve, and the paragraph below about "an investment maturing in 2027" is describing a horizon the plan now reaches. YouTube still shouldn't displace short-form or the .io logs, and it still won't carry the gate — but it is no longer purely deferred value, and the two long-form technical pieces are worth making properly rather than fitting in.

The case for is strong on longer horizons:

  • Conversion is 10–40× better than TikTok — 0.5–2% of views versus 0.05–0.3%. A 20k-view technical video can out-produce a 500k-view TikTok on emails.
  • The technical audience is your best audience per capita. They buy multi-anchor kits, they become the community, they write firmware apps, they're the reason the ecosystem exists.
  • It's the reference library. Every reviewer, journalist, and cautious backer who wants to know if you're real will look for a teardown or a build video. Having one converts skeptics you'll never otherwise meet.
  • Search traffic is permanent. "nRF52 power optimization" and "3D print smoothing" bring people in for years.

So: three long-form videos in the launch window (founder story, "I tried to beat my own device for a week," teardown/how-it-works), plus technical videos at whatever pace you enjoy — and treat those as an investment maturing over 2027, not a March lever.

One efficiency: you're already writing the Hackaday.io logs. A log with photos is 80% of a video script. Film while you build, narrate the log, done. The marginal cost is much lower than it looks.

7. Reddit — Carefully

Most relevant subs ban self-promotion, and r/ADHD specifically will remove product posts and may ban you. Do not post the product there.

What works instead:

  • Participate genuinely for months in r/ADHD, r/getdisciplined, r/nosurf, r/decidingtobebetter, r/theXeffect without linking anything
  • r/somethingimade, r/electronics, r/embedded, r/arduino allow build posts — lead with the hardware
  • r/beeminder and quantified-self communities are small but perfectly targeted; a "made a hardware version of this idea" post is on-topic there
  • Message moderators before posting anywhere you're unsure. A single approved post beats three removed ones.
  • Never use alt accounts to seed. It gets found, and for this product in particular it would be a fitting and fatal irony.

8. Newsletters & Podcasts

Pitch in November, run placements in January (moved 2026-08-21 from September/October). January is the highest-intent month of the year for this product's subject matter, which makes it the right month to buy rather than merely a convenient one.

Newsletter targets: ADDitude (ADHD, large list, accepts sponsorship), dev/hardware newsletters, productivity and digital-minimalism newsletters, quantified-self roundups. Conversion 2–5% of opens — the best paid rate you'll find.

Podcast targets: ADHD podcasts (high loyalty, hosts can name the condition freely), productivity shows, digital-minimalism shows, hardware/maker podcasts. Ask for a host-read or a founder interview; interviews convert better and cost nothing.

Pitch template — four sentences:

One line on what it is, using the self-binding frame. One line on why it's for their audience specifically, referencing an actual episode or issue. One link to the Sunrise Lock clip. One clear ask with a date.

Expect 10–20% reply on genuine personalisation, 1–2% on templates.

9. Creator Outreach Mechanics

You cannot ship units before FCC authorization. Physical seeding is February. Until then everything runs on your footage plus live video demos.

Live Zoom demo is the highest-converting tool you have. 20 minutes, Sunrise Lock working in real time, they can ask you to make it do things. They can then honestly say they watched it work. Do this with every top-tier contact.

List: 100–150 people across three audiences — ADHD creators, productivity/digital-minimalism channels, hardware/maker channels. Tiers: 10–20 mid (100k–1M), 60–80 small (10–100k), rest micro. The small tier converts best.

Asset pack: 4–6 clean vertical clips with no overlay, landscape versions, one 60-second usable-whole cut, product stills, the one-page claims brief from §0, link and launch date.

Formats to offer, best first: founder interview on their channel → reaction/stitch to your clip → problem-first video with your clip as payoff → explainer over your b-roll → "would you buy this?" commentary.

Paid: $300–1,500 per dedicated video from a ~50k creator. Buy 5–10 in October and treat it as data — you're finding which framing converts before you spend on ads.

Non-cash currency: advisory role, public credit, input on which commitment types ship, a private channel with you, early firmware access, name in the repo contributors file. Converts a one-off post into six months of advocacy.

Two hard rules for the brief, in bold: creators must never imply they tested a unit they haven't held, and paid partnerships need visible disclosure.

10. Numbers To Expect

Source View → email
TikTok / Reels 0.05–0.3%
YouTube (description link) 0.5–2%
HN front page 5–10% of ~10–40k visits
Hackaday feature 3–8%
Newsletter mention 2–5%

500k TikTok views ≈ 500 emails. One HN front page ≈ 1,000–3,000. Your emails will come from the technical channels. Front-load the build logs and the HN posts accordingly — the social video is for reach and creator ammunition, not list building.

Reservations: expect 5–12% of your list to put down $15. 3,000 emails → 150–360 deposits. Deposit-holders convert to backers at 40–60% versus 3–5% for a cold email, which is what makes day-one velocity possible.

Honest range over 27 weeks (revised 2026-08-21 from 12): 2,500–6,000 emails. Flat outcome ≈ 800 (don't launch). One breakout clip ≈ 10,000+. The longer runway raises the floor and the median; it does not change the shape of the distribution, because that is set by whether one technical post lands.

Reservations against a September 2027 ship: the 5–12% conversion below still holds, but a deposit taken in December is nine months from fulfilment. That is a mechanism problem, not a marketing one — see Timeline.md DEC-01.

11. Weekly Operating Rhythm

Every rate here was cut on 2026-08-21, deliberately. The originals were written for a twelve-week sprint by someone with the hours; this plan runs twenty-seven weeks through a school term and a busier job. A rate you hit for six months beats a rate you abandon in month three, and the number that decides the campaign — emails per week, trending — does not care about post count. If these turn out too easy, raise them in January. That is a much better problem than the alternative.

Sunday, ~2 hours: batch-film 8–10 clips (was 12–15). Non-negotiable, and the only rate cut in volume rather than in kind. This is the single mechanic that keeps the plan alive past week five. Monday: schedule the week's posts. Write the Hackaday log on alternate weeks until January, then weekly. Tue–Thu: 10 creator emails (was 20; back to 20 from December). Reply to every comment on everything. Friday: review numbers. Kill the worst hook, clone the best. Saturday: off. Actually off.

Posting rate by month: 2/week Sep–Oct → 3/week Nov–Jan → 5/week Feb → daily in March.

You're about to test sustained routine on yourself for six months while building a product for people who find that hard. Batch-filming and a real day off are what make it survivable — and the irony of burning out on this particular launch is not lost on anyone. The twelve-week version of this plan was already flagged as likely to fail here (launch-plan.md §12.32); the twenty-seven-week version is more likely to, not less, which is the whole reason the rates above came down.

12. Tracking

Minimum viable dashboard, checked Fridays:

  • Emails captured, by source (UTM everything)
  • Deposits placed, and deposit rate off the list
  • Per-clip: views, completion rate, profile clicks, link clicks
  • Which hook is in the top three clips
  • Creator emails sent → replies → placements
  • Kickstarter pre-launch page follows

Ad spend to date against BUD-ADS, and cost per email where it's attributable (new 2026-08-21 — there is a budget now)

The one number that matters: emails per week, trending. GATE-TRAJECTORY exists to force that reading at 2026-11-30 — 600 emails. If it's not compounding by then, the hook is wrong — change the hook, not the volume.