Vision
The Thesis
People do not kill houseplants through neglect. They kill them by following care advice written for someone else's room.
"Water weekly" is wrong in a dark hallway and wrong again by a south window. Frond measures the room, then schedules the plant. The claim is that a schedule you can see the reasoning for is a schedule you will actually follow.
Who it's for
Someone with between three and fifteen houseplants who has already killed a few and minds about it. Not a collector with a humidity cabinet, and not someone who wants a single rubber plant to survive by luck.
The job they are hiring us for: "tell me what to do this week, and be right often enough that I stop second-guessing you."
What success looks like
A user who has not opened the app in a month still waters on our schedule, because they learned it.
The skeptic-convincer is narrower: a user who moves a plant to a new room, re-surveys, sees the schedule change, and agrees with the change.
Principles
- Never guess a schedule. One honest question beats an invented number.
- Copy never scolds. A missed plant is a failure of our timing, not the user's character.
- Offline first. The app has to work where the plants are.
- Confidence is a feature. Show why a schedule says what it says, or it will not be trusted.