ROUX
An ADHD Companion for Mindful Eating and Effortless Meal Planning
Services
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Product Marketing
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Product Strategy
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0-to-1
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B2C
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GTM
Roux is a meal-planning app addressing the $1.5B industry's blind spot for ADHD brains, where rigid planning tools consistently fail. Built 0-to-1 and validated through 50+ user interviews and prototype testing with 20+ users sourced from ADHD Babes, a 200+ member ADHD Discord community. Success is measured not by unbroken streaks but by return rate after a gap, forgiving re-entry over perfection.
Opportunity
A $1.5B market with a massive blind spot
Meal planning apps are a $1.5 billion industry. And almost none of it was built for how ADHD brains actually work. Mainstream apps prioritize rigid structure and endless options, which, for neurodivergent users, doesn't feel like flexibility; it feels like a wall. The market gap wasn't a missing feature. It was a missing understanding of who the user actually was.
Diagnosis
Before building anything, I needed to understand why existing tools were failing this audience. I ran competitive analysis across four dominant apps and qualitative interviews with ADHD users across three different life contexts.
01 - Time blindness creates disproportionate stress around meal timing. It's not that users forget to eat; it's that time itself feels unpredictable.
02 - Energy levels fluctuate depending on mental fatigue, making meal planning feel impossible at the exact moment it's needed most.
03 - More options don't help; they cause decision paralysis and lead to abandoning planning altogether.
Every existing competitor—MyFitnessPal, Paprika, and Plan to Eat—is optimized for volume. More recipes, more tracking, more control. The research said the opposite was true. ROUX's positioning came down to one idea: fewer decisions, better defaults, more joy. Not another planner. An ADHD companion.
Solution
Every feature in ROUX traces directly back to something the research said.
Weekly view instead of monthly because the research showed monthly planning triggers overwhelm before you even start.
Adaptive reminders instead of scheduled ones because a brain that's learned to ignore rigid notifications needs something that responds to it.
Positive affirmations instead of guilt prompts because users view eating as a reset moment, not a task to check off.
Automated grocery lists because reducing steps between decision and execution is the whole point.
This was a 0-to-1 project. Everything from research and design to positioning to feature prioritization came from the strategic foundation built during discovery and ending with a complete end-to-end consumer behavior system.
50+ user interviews · 20+ user testers · sourced from a 200+ member ADHD Discord community · 4 competitors analyzed · 0 to 1: fully interactive
GTM
ROUX's first users came from ADHD Babes, a Discord community where the original research and testing happened, so there were already people excited to see this become real before any official launch. The plan: start with that community as beta testers, then bring in ADHD-focused creators to genuinely try the app and share honest reviews (with a discount code for their followers), letting real trust and word-of-mouth carry it from Discord into TikTok and wider social media channels, instead of launching cold to a broad audience with no existing relationship. Making this work meant staying closely connected with design (so the app's ADHD-friendly feel carries into how it's marketed), engineering (making sure the reminder system, the part users care about most, is solid before anything else), and community management (building feedback into Discord/Reddit directly, since this audience tends to ignore normal support tickets).
Success Metrics
Roux's success isn't measured by perfect daily streaks for ADHD users; the real signal is whether they come back after falling off. Here's what the tracking plan is built to capture and what prototype testing already validated:
Meal completion rate: checkmark taps vs. skipped meals, tracking whether reminders are actually driving action
Energy-based quick-pick usage: how often users choose the low/medium/high shortcut over browsing, especially on unplanned days
Return rate after a gap: % of users who come back after missing days, since forgiving re-entry matters more than unbroken use. In prototype testing, users self-reported they'd continue using Roux even after missing days; actual return-rate tracking begins post-launch
Affirmation engagement: repeated interaction with completion/reward moments over time, to confirm the gamification drives real return use, not just novelty
These signals were shaped by 50+ user interviews and prototype usability testing with 20+ users, sourced from ADHD Babes, a 200+ member ADHD Discord community.