Impulse — Kickstarter Campaign Page (Draft)¶

Drafted: 2026-08-11 · Revised: 2026-08-21 (ship date, campaign date) · Status: draft copy, three blocking decisions unresolved (§0.2) Campaign launches: 1 March 2027 · Ships: October 2027 Sources: launch-plan.md (positioning §1–2, pricing §4, FCC §5, claims §10, risks §12), marketing_strategy.md (voice §7), ../../Impulse Launch Video.md (the spine — this page is that script in page form), content-push.md §0 (claims fence).

What this is. The campaign page copy, written to be pasted into Kickstarter's editor and shot around. Prose in > blocks is copy. Everything else is direction, and shouldn't ship.

0.1 The claims fence, restated at the top because it governs every line below¶

From launch-plan.md §10 and content-push.md §0. These are not style preferences; several are legal exposure.

Never impossible to cheat / unbeatable / can't be bypassed → hard to beat on impulse
The anchor locks its own strap. Never the watch, never the wearer.
Anchor backup battery ≈ 1 hour today, 2–3 h target. Never imply indefinite.
Watch battery: 8 hours minimum (firmware_spec_v3_nrf.md §6.3). Never imply multi-day.
No app-blocking, no uninstall detection. Both were cut. Purge from any comparison table.
No frame or sentence putting vibration and the LED ring on one unit until the new revision is validated. DISABLE_MOTOR 1 compiles the motor out on the ESP32 watch so the ring can own GPIO 10 — the buzzing in the existing footage is the buzzer. No footage that exists can support a vibration claim.
No medical claims, ever. No "treats", "manages symptoms", "clinically".
The word "enforcement" does not appear on this page. Internal only. Use holds the line, follow-through, commitment, sparingly.
Lead with the freedom on the other side of the friction, not the buzzing.

0.2 Four decisions this page is blocked on¶

Written into the copy as [DECIDE] markers where they bite.

Ship date. ✅ Answered 2026-08-21 by the timeline change. launch-plan.md now targets September 2027 and communicates October 2027; this page uses October 2027, and the launch video script has been corrected to match. The website still says "Ships Q1 2027" and is now wrong by three quarters — website/ is outside the vault and has to be fixed by hand. The Kickstarter date becomes an FTC 30-day-rule obligation, so October is the number that matters and it is deliberately two months past the internal target.
Battery vs the example day (§12.11, half-resolved). 8 h from a 6 am start is flat by 2 pm. The video's day includes a 5:30 pm gym window and an 11 pm phone dock. No marketing may show the 8-hour figure and a late window together until one of the three outs is picked. §5 below ships the morning-and-afternoon day by default and holds the evening items.
Main tier: $125 or $135 (§13). This page uses $135, per §4's own recommendation, with the round number taken out of the early bird instead.
The hard override's mechanism (§11.2). "Both buttons held 10 seconds" was written against a board that no longer exists; the replacement is being worked out in Concepts/Safety.md. §8 below states the requirement without choreography, because the requirement is what backers need and the mechanism isn't settled.

1. Title and blurb¶

Title (60 char max):

Impulse: a commitment device for the promises you break

Alternatives held in reserve: Impulse: hardware that holds you to your own decisions · Impulse: a watch and anchors that make your plans stick.

Rejected: anything led by "alarm" (sells the wedge as the whole product — §1 says self-binding is the category, ADHD is the beachhead); anything containing "habit-enforcement" (§7 bans "enforcement" in consumer copy); anything naming ADHD (§12.22's logic — it narrows you to the beachhead in the one field everyone reads).

Blurb (135 char max):

A watch and anchors that hold you to the day you planned last night. The alarm you can't snooze from bed, and four more like it.

Category: Technology → Wearables.

Note on "can't snooze from bed." The three words at the end are load-bearing. donningGraceS is clamped 0–1800 s, so a user can configure thirty minutes of silence by donning the watch and lying back down. "The alarm you can't snooze" is disprovable from your own spec; "from bed" is true against the firmware as built — you have to actually put the watch on, and it resumes by itself. Keep the qualifier everywhere. (See the open Todos.md block on this.)

2. Above the fold¶

Video. The launch video, cut to campaign length. Autoplays silent for many viewers — the first three seconds must read without sound.

Headline under the video:

Stop negotiating with yourself.

Sub:

You already decided what kind of day you want. Impulse is the hardware that makes sure your 6 am self can't talk you out of it.

(Matches website/src/data/pitch.ts exactly. Keep them identical — a backer who clicks through from the site should land on the same sentence.)

Funding bar context line:

Goal: $15,000 · 30 days · Ships October 2027

3. What it is¶

Impulse is two pieces of hardware and an app.

The watch goes on your wrist. It holds your schedule, it knows which room it's in, and it decides whether you're actually doing the thing you said you'd do.

Anchors plug into the wall in the places that matter — nightstand, desk, kitchen, front door. They quietly broadcast who they are, so the watch always knows where it is. They also make noise, and during a commitment they lock themselves to whatever they're strapped to, so one can't be quietly carried out of the room.

The app is where you, last night, decide what today looks like. Once the day starts, your phone has nothing to do with any of this. That turns out to matter more than anything else here, and I'll come back to it.

The whole thing runs on one idea: you make decisions when you're clear-headed, and the hardware holds you to them when you're not. Past you runs the day.

4. Sunrise Lock¶

Flagship demo. Clip + three stills. This is the section 60% of the content plan is built on.

The watch charges overnight on the nightstand, right next to its anchor. At your wake-up time the anchor sounds — so the alarm isn't a device on your nightstand, it's the room. There's nothing to reach over and press.

Putting the watch on quiets it and starts a grace period you set yourself. Mine's five minutes, which is enough to sit up and become a person. When it's up, if you're still in the bedroom, the watch and the anchor go together, and they escalate until you're out of the room. The moment you're out: silence.

Every one of those numbers is something you chose the night before, when you were calm and fully in agreement that getting up at 6 was a great idea.

Direction: the clip is the silent take through the bedroom door in one shot. Don't cut it — the unbroken take is the proof. No wrist-vibration claim in the copy or the caption; "the watch and the anchor go together" is what the footage supports.

5. The rest of the day¶

Proof of range. Short, fast, one image each.

Once it's set up, the same mechanism just does different things.

6:30 am — the phone dock. My phone lives on the kitchen anchor until 9. There's a tolerance, so a quick check is fine: glance at a text, put it back, nothing happens. Stand there scrolling and the watch and the anchor both start, and they don't stop until the phone goes back down.

7:30 am — out the door. The watch sees WiFi as well as Bluetooth, which means I can commit to places outside my own house. Anywhere with a network. If it can still see my home WiFi at 7:30, it knows I haven't left, and it gets progressively harder to ignore until I do.

Afternoons — at the desk, without the phone. Those two rules stack. Being at my desk with my phone in my hand was about ninety percent of what "studying" meant to me last year.

[DECIDE] The 5:30 pm gym window and the 11 pm bedtime dock are held out of this section pending decision 2 in §0.2 — 8 hours from a 6 am start doesn't reach either, and §12.11 forbids putting the figure and a late window on the same page. Restore them the moment the battery copy is settled; both are strong and the bedtime one is the most relatable item you have.

6. This is not an app blocker¶

The sharpest differentiator you own. Own it explicitly.

Every screen-time app has the same fatal flaw: the thing doing the blocking lives on the phone it's supposed to be policing. The second you actually want to scroll, you win. You always win. That's not a bug in those apps — that's just what they are.

Impulse doesn't block anything. It measures distance. The anchor knows the phone is sitting on it, and the watch knows how far you are from that anchor. There's nothing on your phone to delete, because none of this was ever on your phone.

To be clear about what it doesn't do: Impulse does not block apps and does not detect whether you've uninstalled anything. Both were explored and both were cut — they don't survive contact with what iOS and Android actually allow. Anyone telling you their app-blocker can't be disabled is describing something the platforms don't permit.

7. "Okay, but—"¶

The highest-converting section on the page, and your defence against the coercion narrative (§12.8). §7 of the video script, as prose. Deliver it fast — you're anticipating the comments, not lecturing.

"Just take the watch off." The watch knows when it's on your wrist. Taking it off during a commitment doesn't end the commitment — it hands it to the anchors, which sound in whichever rooms you told them to. Taking it off doesn't make it quiet. It makes it louder, in a room you're not standing in.

"Just unplug the anchor." There's a battery inside. Unplugging it gets you a battery-powered version of the same noise — about an hour of it today, and we're aiming for two to three. And during a commitment the anchor locks itself to whatever it's strapped to, so it can't be quietly carried out of the room or shoved in a drawer.

"Just change the schedule." The watch owns the schedule, not the app. You can make any commitment harder instantly, whenever you want. Making one easier takes about a day to go through. The version of you that wants out at 6 am doesn't get a vote. The version from yesterday afternoon already voted, and was in a much better mood.

"Just change the clock." Tried it. The watch refuses time changes that would end a window you're currently in, and everything inside counts elapsed time rather than clock time. Winding the clock forward ages nothing.

"Just delete the app." Go ahead. The app is for setup. The schedule already lives on the watch.

And if something real comes up, because life happens, you get emergency passes on an allowance you set for yourself.

I'm not going to tell you this is impossible to cheat, because it isn't. You can put a pillow over an anchor — though moving the anchor somewhere harder to reach mostly solves that. You can take a hammer to one. But nobody wakes up at 6 am and executes a plan. What happens at 6 am is you reach out and press a button. Everything here exists to make sure there is no one-second version of giving up. It turns out that when the easy way out is gone, I just… do the thing.

Direction: the hammer shot goes here, in slow motion. Showing the bypass is what makes the rest credible.

8. You can always stop¶

Preempts §12.8 in the place a skeptical reader is looking for it. Currently prose, not a demo — see decision 4.

There is a hard stop on the watch itself. It is never delayed, never rationed, and can't be configured away — not by the app, not by a schedule, not by you in a calm moment deciding future-you shouldn't have it. It works on the watch alone: no phone, no network, no account. It logs that it happened and doesn't ask why.

That costs us the ability to claim this is inescapable, which we were never going to claim. The honest version is better: you can always stop. The friction is that stopping is total and visible, not that it's impossible.

[DECIDE] No button choreography until Concepts/Safety.md lands. content-push.md #27 wants this filmed and published because it preempts the coercion narrative better than any statement can — but the two-button hold isn't implementable on Board V1, so there's nothing to film yet. If it's still prose at launch, this section carries the whole job.

9. How it's built¶

For the backers who decide whether you're real. Same material as the Show HN — this is the section that converts the technical audience §2 identifies as your best per-capita buyer.

The design question underneath all of this is: which part of the system do you trust? The answer can't be the phone, because the phone is what you're trying to get away from, and it can't be the app, because an app is four taps from being gone.

So the watch is the root of trust. It owns the schedule and it owns the clock. The app proposes changes; the watch decides whether to accept them. Tightening a commitment applies immediately. Loosening one is quarantined for about a day. Timers count elapsed time, so the clock is not an attack surface. And when a radio link is degraded, the system fails open — it would rather miss than falsely accuse you.

The firmware will be open source.

Direction: link the Hackaday.io project page and the repo if any of it is public by launch. Don't overstate what's published.

10. Who it's for¶

I built this for me first. I have ADHD. The thing it takes off my plate is the all-day project of managing myself into doing stuff I already wanted to do. If that sentence hit, this is for you.

But you don't need a diagnosis to want this. If you're tired of breaking promises to yourself — to your sleep, your gym, your work, your mornings — that's the same problem with a different label.

No efficacy claims, no treatment language, nothing in third person about "people with ADHD." First person only. (§6 of marketing_strategy.md and §12.7.)

11. Tiers¶

Six maximum (BUD-TIERS) — decision paralysis is a defining trait of the beachhead audience. Complete is the visual default. Never a watch-only tier: one anchor is the minimum for a working Sunrise Lock, which is the reason people are here.

Tier	Price	Contents	Retail equiv.	Notes
Early bird starter	$125	Watch + 1 anchor	$199	Cap ~400. Size to sell out in 24–48 h. Consider an exclusive colourway rather than only cutting price.
Starter	$135	Watch + 1 anchor	$199	32% off retail
Complete ★	$209	Watch + 3 anchors	$299	Visual default
Whole home	$269	Watch + 5 anchors	$379
Founder's edition	$369	Whole home kit, early firmware access, private dev channel, input on which commitment types ship, name in the repo contributors file	—	Cap ~100
Add-on: 2 anchors	$69		$99	Available on any tier

[DECIDE] §13's open question is $125 vs $135 for the main tier. This table takes §4's advice: hold Starter at $135 and spend the round number on the early bird. Incremental anchor pricing stays ~$35 across every tier — consistency reads as fair, irregularity reads as manipulation.

Every price must be framed as X% off the $199/$299/$379 retail from day one, so retail never reads as a hike later. Flipper went $169 → $199 and never discounted; the frame is what made that survivable.

Never add a second early-bird tier after the first sells out. It reads as manipulative to exactly the audience most likely to notice.

12. Risks and challenges¶

Kickstarter requires this section. Yours should be the best-written thing on the page — the caveats are the ad, and this audience can smell a sales pitch.

Battery. The watch runs a minimum of 8 hours and charges overnight. That's by design — it charges while you sleep, which is exactly why Sunrise Lock works. If you want a 24/7 fitness tracker, this isn't that.

The anchor's backup battery is about an hour right now. We're targeting two to three. Unplugging an anchor doesn't buy you silence, but it isn't indefinite either, and we'd rather tell you the number than let you find it out.

Phone-distance can false-alarm. It's Bluetooth, and Bluetooth is Bluetooth. Low power mode or a degraded link can confuse it. The system is built to fail open, so a bad connection means it doesn't punish you — but you do need to keep the phone docked near its anchor and out of low power mode.

It's hard to beat on impulse. It is not impossible to beat. Section 7 above is honest about every way out I know of, and I'd rather you read that before you back this than discover it in March.

FCC certification is the schedule risk. The radios are pre-certified modules, which removes most of it, but the finished product still needs its own testing and a lab slot, and each round of testing has a failure mode that costs weeks. This is the single most likely reason the date moves. The campaign is what funds it.

This is my first hardware product. Manufacturing, tooling, and app store review all sit between funding and shipping, and any of them can slip. October 2027 is the honest target with the slack I know about built in. If it moves, you'll hear it from me before you hear it from anyone else.

13. Required legal disclosure¶

Prominent, near the top, not buried in an FAQ. The 2022 FCC rule change is what makes this campaign legal before certification, and it's conditional on the disclosure. It also reads as competence to the technical audience.

FCC notice. This device has not been authorized as required by the rules of the Federal Communications Commission. This device is not, and may not be, offered for sale or lease, or sold or leased, until authorization is obtained. Delivery of any unit is conditional on completing FCC authorization.

Also state plainly: United States only for this campaign. No CE/RED and no ISED in the certification scope for launch (decided 2026-08-10) — the EU and Canada are separate bodies of work, and promising them here creates an obligation nothing currently funds.

14. FAQ¶

Answers stay short. Anything long enough to need three paragraphs belongs in §7 or §12 instead.

Does it block apps? No, and it never will — see §6.
What happens if I take the watch off? The anchors take over. §7.
What if I need out? Emergency passes on an allowance you set, plus a hard stop that's always available. §8.
How long does the battery last? 8 hours minimum, charges overnight in 2–3.
How many anchors do I need? One works. Three is the setup most people end up with. It scales to five.
Does it work without the app? After setup, yes. The schedule lives on the watch.
Does it need WiFi? For WiFi-based commitments, yes. Everything else is Bluetooth between the watch and the anchors.
Will the firmware be open? Yes.
Do I need an ADHD diagnosis? No. §10.
Where do you ship? United States for this campaign. §13.

15. During the campaign¶

From §12.18 and content-push.md §1:

All traffic to Kickstarter for 30 days, no exceptions. Site pre-orders don't count toward the total that makes the campaign look funded, and they dilute the velocity that drives placement. The site reverts to primary afterwards.
Daily campaign-native posting — funding milestones, stretch goals, backer questions.
Press follow-ups to everyone who didn't reply in Sept/Oct. A live campaign is a news hook a pre-launch isn't.
Stretch goals carry the real ambition, not the goal. $15,000 funds fast, and "funded in 3 hours" is a headline. Flipper tied stretch goals to features and unlocked everything the next day.
Have the coercion-narrative response written before launch (§13, still open). One "I bought a dystopian punishment watch" take with no prepared answer costs you the campaign's news cycle.

16. What this page is still missing¶

The hard-override demo (decision 4) — the single best asset for §8 and it can't be filmed yet.
A decision on where the $15 deposits live, which determines whether the pre-launch page collects them (GATE-DEPOSITS, AUG-03).
Vertical clip count confirmed against AUG-01's bar — 4–6 vertical plus landscape. The campaign page needs landscape; the pre-launch push needs vertical.
A regulatory/claims review with a lawyer before this goes live (§13, open).