I lost the best painter I ever hired. So I built an app.

Not a developer. Dad of three. I got tired of not being able to answer basic questions about my own house — and I did something about it.

Two years ago I hired a painter. He showed up when he said he would. He charged what he quoted. He did perfect work and left the place cleaner than he found it.

On his way out I said, genuinely, "we'll call you again."
Last fall my wife asked if we had his number.

I checked my texts. Scrolled back forever. Checked my email. Asked her if she had it. She thought I did. I thought she did.

We never found it. I hired someone off a neighborhood Facebook group instead. The work was fine. But it wasn't him.

That's a small thing, I know. Nobody's life falls apart over a lost contractor. But it stuck with me, because it was part of a larger pattern I couldn't shake.

The pattern was this: I had the information. It just didn't exist anywhere I could find it.

• Furnace filter size? I had to go downstairs, pull out the old one, read the size off the side, drive to the store. Twenty minutes for a question that should take twenty seconds.
• Paint color in the living room? Somewhere in an old text thread with my wife from when we were at the hardware store three years ago.
• Dishwasher still under warranty? No idea. Probably not. Check the drawer in the kitchen with all the other manuals nobody looks at.
• Kids' shoe sizes by brand? My wife knows. Her brain is essentially a Supabase database for the household. She shouldn't have to be.

I'm not a disorganized person. I'm actually kind of annoyingly meticulous. But meticulous didn't matter because the system didn't exist. Everything lived somewhere different - texts, email, a notes app, a junk drawer, my wife's memory - and none of it was findable when someone needed it.

So I decided to build something.

A few problems with that plan: I'm not a developer. I work a full-time job. I have three kids. I do most of my "building" after they go to bed, on a couch, with a laptop.

What I had going for me: a real problem, a clear use case, and access to AI tools that have genuinely leveled the playing field for non-technical builders in a way that I don't think people fully appreciate yet.

I started prototyping with AI assistance about six months ago. Lots of dead ends. Lots of "this kind of works" before I got to "this actually works." I learned enough about Supabase to be dangerous. I broke things. I fixed them. I broke them again.

The result is kept — a home and life memory app.

The concept is simple: it's the one place that holds everything about your home and family that you should be able to answer but can't. Appliances (model numbers, purchase dates, warranties). Contractors (name, number, what they charged, when to call them again). Paint colors. Furnace filters. Kids' shoe sizes by brand. Service histories. Anything that your future self will need and your current self will forget.

You scan a barcode and it fills in the product details automatically. You can scan a receipt and it pulls out what you bought. There's AI that surfaces relevant recommendations based on what you've stored. It works on any device, no download required — though a native app is coming.

Where things stand:

Web app is live at getkeptapp.com
Waitlist is open for the native iOS/Android app
Zero paying users (no pricing yet)
A small number of real people using it
One piece of feedback that genuinely made me ship a feature the same night I received it

No funding. No co-founder. No background in software. Just a problem I kept bumping into and a stubbornness about solving it properly.

What I'm trying to figure out:
Right now my main challenge is distribution. The product works. I believe in the use case - I think most homeowners have felt this exact problem, they just haven't framed it as a problem that software could solve. The hard part is reaching them.

A few things I'm working through:

How do you market an app whose core value proposition is "remember the boring stuff"? The use case is real but it's not exciting to describe.
Is the right path Reddit communities, SEO, social content, all three, something else entirely? (reddit has been a nightmare to get anything posted)

At what point do you add pricing, and what does freemium look like for something like this?

If you've built in the home/consumer space or dealt with distribution for a utility app with a quiet but real use case, I'd genuinely love to hear from you. Not looking for validation - I'm looking for honest pattern recognition from people who've been here.

The painter's name was Dave.
I added a contractor named Dave to kept the day I launched it just to remind myself why I built it.

If you want to be first when the native app ships: getkeptapp.com