Meet the Founder
I'm an electronics engineer who has spent the past seven years designing hardware across industrial, consumer, and military high-reliability electronics, including intercom systems running across thousands of prison cells, Class 3 life-critical military systems for Boeing, and consumer products sold in the millions.
After years of designing electronics for other companies, I wanted to build something of my own — that's where the idea for Build Good Habits came from.
Build Good Habits: I design electronics that make people do the things they know are good for them, even when they don't feel like it — like moving in the morning or stepping away from a screen after a long day. The approach draws on two ideas from James Clear's Atomic Habits:
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Increase friction
Make bad habits hard. Increase the number of steps between you and a bad habit so that it becomes impractical. -
Commitment device
Use your good intentions now to make a choice that limits your future choices to ones that benefit you. It needs to take more effort to get out of the good habit than to just see it through.
Everybody already knows they'd feel better if they got up on time and moved their body in the morning. Nobody needs more information. What they need is a morning where getting up isn't a decision made by the least motivated version of themselves at 6 am.
How it started
When I set out on my own, I wanted to find a way to make a real impact and help people.
I noticed how much screen time was creeping into everyday life — and how much it was costing us. A 2018 study of over 1.2 million people, published in The Lancet Psychiatry, found that people who exercised regularly reported 43% fewer poor mental health days than those who didn't.¹ That's what inspired me to design products that get people moving and off their screens, for the sake of their mental health.
Skiparoo started with a simple demo board and a skipping rope from the shop. From that first rough setup, I worked through a couple of prototypes, refining each one, until I finally landed on the production version you see today.
I've been using it every morning for the past three months, and a handful of trial users have been testing it too. It's been working well.
Skiparoo is designed by me here in Melbourne.
What we make
The Skiparoo alarm clock connects to a Bluetooth skipping rope and won't switch off until you've completed your target number of skips. See our FAQ and product page for full details.
It's $59.99 with free shipping anywhere in Australia.
Keep an eye on your inbox — we've got a new product launching in a few months, and we can't wait to share it with you.
How we work
As a startup, we welcome all feedback — it helps us keep improving.
Final assembly and testing are carried out in our Melbourne office. Every product we release has gone through extensive testing with trial users over several months before it reaches the public.
Get in touch
Questions about the clock, an order, or an idea for what we should build next are all welcome. Head to our contact page and we'll get back to you.
If you'd like to follow the build — prototypes, production runs, and other stuff — that's over on the blog.
¹ Chekroud et al., "Association between physical exercise and mental health in 1.2 million individuals in the USA between 2011 and 2015," The Lancet Psychiatry, 2018. Study summary.