Neve Phillips / Case study

Solace: help for ADHD brains, matched to how you feel right now.

A cross-platform mental-health app grounded in autonomic nervous-system science — live on the App Store and Google Play, built end-to-end by one person with no engineering budget.

App Store → Google Play → Linktree →

The problem

Most mental-health apps hand everyone the same meditation, regardless of what their nervous system is actually doing. For ADHD brains — where dysregulation swings between shutdown, restlessness, and overwhelm, sometimes in one afternoon — that's close to useless. A breathing exercise that helps when you're anxious does nothing when you're burnt out and can't start anything.

This one was personal. Before I was diagnosed with ADHD, I'd already spent years building my own coping methods — Post-it notes that broke tasks into tiny, dopamine-rewarding steps. Solace is that instinct, taken seriously: months of research into autonomic nervous-system science, customer discovery interviews, ADHD community surveys, and competitor mapping, all pointing at the same gap. Nobody offered in-the-moment regulation tools matched to your current state.

The model

Seven states, not one-size-fits-all.

The core of Solace is a seven-state model of the autonomic nervous system. You tell the app how you feel; it matches you to a short tool designed for exactly that state. I designed the model and validated it in collaboration with practising therapists.

Relaxed but a little unmotivatedCalm and unstressed, but focus and drive are low.

Clear-headed, focused, and engagedMentally sharp and able to stay on task.

Hyper-focused and absorbedIntensely locked in — losing track of time and surroundings.

Wired and restlessFidgety and slightly on edge.

Distracted and procrastinatingDisorganised and scattered, stuck between urgency and avoidance.

Overstimulated and anxiousStressed and tense, struggling to relax or quiet your mind.

Burnt out and mentally paralysedDrained and disconnected — too overwhelmed to think or take action.

Solace state selector screen listing all seven nervous-system states — The state selector — the first thing you see

Solace category picker with the Five Minute Fix toggle — media, music, activities and suggestions — Matched tools — most take five minutes or less

How it was built

Every stage meant learning a new discipline.

I had no engineering budget and no team, so I taught myself to build with layered AI workflows — Claude and GPT-4 for research synthesis and code, Lovable and Replit for prototyping. The stages below are chronological; each one was a discipline I hadn't done before.

Research & discovery

Months of research into autonomic nervous-system science and existing interventions. Customer discovery interviews, ADHD community surveys, competitor mapping, and market sizing — which surfaced the gap Solace fills.

Science & design

Designed the seven-state model and the intervention engine behind it. Taught myself Figma for wireframes, flows, and prototypes — accessibility-first UX for ADHD minds: short interactions, clear hierarchy, minimal cognitive load.

Build

Layered AI development: Claude and GPT-4 for synthesis, code, and prompt engineering; the app's 150+ interactive regulation activities built across AI tools, 35+ of them in Lovable; media created in InVideo; a real-time heart-rate monitor using the phone camera.

Testing & clinical input

Structured alpha and beta testing with 45 testers, 20 of them with ADHD. Worked with therapists to validate the interventions and the model itself; iterated the state selector, activity flows, and onboarding from tester feedback.

Business & strategy

Full business plan: subscription model via RevenueCat, demographics and market sizing, unit economics, retention benchmarks, and a mapped monetisation funnel — plus B2B exploration with schools, universities, and corporate wellness.

Launch

Shipped on iOS and Android. Learned app store optimisation from scratch — keywords, screenshots, descriptions, creative assets — and iterated the store listings to grow conversion and visibility.

Growth & marketing

TikTok campaigns with iterative optimisation, AI agents scheduling and posting social content, all creative designed by me, and A/B tests across creatives, copy, and targeting to bring acquisition costs down.

Analytics

Full-funnel tracking from impression to paid conversion — daily velocity, cohort retention, DAU/MAU, ARPPU. Every product and creative decision ran through the data.

A decision that mattered

Onboarding originally took six steps. Testers with ADHD were dropping out before they ever reached a tool — which is exactly the failure the app exists to prevent. I cut onboarding to a single step, and retention rose by 30 points.

Evidence

Tested with the people it's for.

Across structured alpha and beta rounds with 45 testers — 20 of them with ADHD — 89% reported relief within five minutes of using a matched tool, and 93% preferred Solace to competitor apps they'd tried. After launch, every key store metric grew quarter on quarter.

Q1 → Q2, both stores
downloads +119% · proceeds +207% · impressions +166% · sessions +134%

Solace home screen with progress map, stats, saved tools and heart-rate monitor — Home — progress map, stats, and saved tools

Solace real-time heart-rate monitor measuring BPM via the phone camera — Real-time heart-rate monitoring via the phone camera

Solace brain-training games matched to your current mental state — Brain-training games matched to your state

Solace login screen with separate user and therapist accounts — Separate user and therapist accounts

What's next

Solace is moving toward B2B — universities and businesses whose people need regulation tools at the moment of need, not a wellness portal they never open. Meanwhile I've trained AI agents to handle operational work like content scheduling, so my own time goes to strategy, product, and growth.

← Back to selected work