It’s been more than 5 years since we finished rebuilding our house. It’s well-lived-in now with subtle scuffs on the walls, a strange splatter on the living room ceiling (no clue what it is or how it got there), a broken kitchen pendant, and a chimney that’s not holding up so well.
It might not be in pristine condition anymore, but we are still grateful for the update and what it has given our family. The most popular spots are ones with a TV, including the back porch where I’m writing this post. It just so happens that the back porch is also where the idea for our next adventure started.
An evening last summer, Justin and I found ourselves here — like we did most nights — to escape the high volume of whatever Netflix kids series was consuming the living room. I remember that it was lightly raining and I was feeling pretty low. I wasn’t finding any satisfaction from the daily slog of life. Not from my job, not from the routine, not from the constant battles that come with parenting two strong-willed kids. I was looking for and desperately needing those little wins that give you a hit of dopamine and tell you that you’re doing something right.
In that moment when I was saying the quiet part out loud, I distinctly remember saying: “You know what I consider a little win? When I find something I’m excited to cook for dinner, and I already have all the ingredients I need.” And then I started lamenting the work required to make that magic happen – keeping a well-stocked pantry, not letting produce go bad in the fridge, and being thoughtful about grocery shopping rather than buying the bare minimum staples to get out of there as soon as possible. (Raises hand.)
Justin, being a problem solver, not to mention a software product manager, started to pull at that thread. How could we make that happen? How could we create a tool that tells you what meals you can make with what’s already in your kitchen? Within a few minutes, his brain had mapped out the beginnings of the how. And from what we could tell, there wasn’t another app in the market doing something similar. No one had figured out a way to inventory your kitchen ingredients and use that as a household database to power other well-known tools like meal planners and shopping lists.
By July, there was a name and an LLC. And over the last year, he has been learning and coding and data mapping and knowledge graph building. It’s getting very close to launching. So much so that we have launched a website and a waitlist.
We hope this becomes an even bigger adventure once Haivenly launches and families begin to feel the benefits of a platform that manages the mental load of household data.
