There's a whiteboard in my living room that started all of this.
Not a fancy digital system. Not an app. A $12 whiteboard from the office supply store, a black marker, and a column of tally marks that my son Ian checked obsessively every single evening.
Ian was diagnosed with autism at two years old. He's twelve now — sharp, funny, deeply loving, and wired in a way that makes the world both harder and more interesting to navigate. He has challenges with behavior, with social boundaries, with the kind of invisible rules most kids absorb without noticing. We've been figuring it out together for a decade.
The whiteboard idea didn't come from me. It came from his school.
At CIES Montessori — a wonderful inclusive school in the Dominican Republic dedicated to helping children become the best version of themselves — they use a simple star system: every student starts the day with five stars. You keep them by making good choices. Lose one for a behavior that crosses a boundary.
It sounds almost too simple — but for Ian, it was a revelation. He became focused on protecting those stars. Not because anyone forced him to, but because the system gave him something concrete to hold onto in a world that often feels abstract and unpredictable.
"The system gave him something concrete to hold onto in a world that often feels abstract and unpredictable."
His mom mentioned it one day. His school's star system was really working.
My wife Daniella — who is not Ian's biological mom, but loves him completely — had an idea: what if we replicate it at home?
So we did. Tasks Ian needed to work on: setting the table, walking the dog, being gentle with animals, respecting physical space, keeping a shower streak going. Points for each one. And at the end of the day, he could redeem them for the one thing in the world that lights him up more than anything: Roblox time.
Not just playing Roblox — Ian builds inside it. Mazes, worlds, logic puzzles. He's attended coding summer camps and picked up Scratch faster than most adults I know. The screen time we were rewarding wasn't a vice. It was a doorway to something real.
The system worked. Better than anything we'd tried before.
"And then I ran into the wall that every divorced parent of a child with autism eventually hits."
His mom wanted to use the same system at her house.
Which made complete sense. Consistency is everything for kids with autism — not just within a single home, but across every environment they move through. School, dad's house, mom's house. The research backs this up. Our own experience backed this up. The whiteboard worked because Ian trusted it. Break that consistency, and you break the trust.
But how do you share a whiteboard across two households?
You can't photograph tally marks and call it a system. You can't text point updates at 9pm and hope everyone's tracking the same numbers. You can't ask a twelve-year-old with autism to mentally reconcile two different versions of the same rules.
I'm a technology manager by profession. I build systems for a living. So I did what felt natural: I looked for an app.
I found plenty of chore apps. They're fine products — for the families they were designed for. But they weren't designed for Ian. They required child email accounts. They had cluttered, distracting interfaces full of notifications and animations. None of them understood that for my son, a disputed point isn't a minor inconvenience — it's a rupture. That if the system can be doubted, it stops working entirely.
None of them were built for what I actually needed: a simple, visual, trustworthy reward system that works the same way in two different homes, with two different caregivers, for a kid who needs to believe in it completely.
"So I built Orbit."
PIN login for kids — no email, no personal data, no friction. An immutable point ledger — every star earned is permanent, no accidental resets. Multi-caregiver support so his mom, Daniella, and I all see the same tasks, the same points, the same rules. A reward system where the parent defines what points are worth — because only you know what actually motivates your child.
Ian is the reason Orbit exists. But the families I built it for are every parent who has stood in front of a whiteboard at 8pm wondering how to make this work across two houses, two schedules, two adults trying their best to stay consistent for a kid who needs it more than most.
This is for you.
"If you've been running your own whiteboard system — Orbit is what I wish I had three years ago."