GrowChi

Growchi is like a Tamagotchi for your health and wellbeing. Your Chi AI companion reflects, grows and evolves as you move, eat, sleep and recharge, making healthy habits fun and rewarding.

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Inspiration

What if looking after yourself felt as engaging as looking after a Tamagotchi? After spending more than 10 years working in life sciences and digital health, I kept seeing the same problem. We built evidence based health programmes and apps, but keeping people engaged was always the biggest challenge. Most health apps track data. Very few create an emotional connection that makes people genuinely want to come back.

That inspired Growchi. Instead of rewarding streaks and numbers, Growchi gives you an AI companion that grows alongside you. As you build healthy habits like sleeping well, exercising and taking care of yourself, your companion evolves too.

The goal isn't to track your health. It's to make you care enough about your companion that looking after yourself becomes something you genuinely want to do. Make being healthy fun is our mission.

What it does

Growchi is an AI wellbeing companion inspired by Tamagotchi and Pokemon.

Your personalised Chi companion reflects your real world habits through active and passive data tracking. Your chi grows and evolves as you sleep well, exercise, eat and practise healthy behaviours for your mind and body. Rather than focusing on boring charts and statistics like existing wearables do, Growchi creates an emotional connection that encourages lasting behaviour change through play, subtle nudges and coaching.

How we built it

I'm not a technical founder, so building GrowChi has been an incredible learning experience.

GrowChi is built with React, Vite, TypeScript and Supabase, deployed on Netlify, with AI used to power the companion, coaching and personalisation experience. The Android app is being prepared with Capacitor.

Codex genuinely became my technical partner. It helped me understand and improve the architecture, build and refine React components, integrate Supabase, debug production issues, improve security, prepare the Android build, explain technical concepts and rapidly iterate on new features.

GPT-5.6 powered the reasoning behind those sessions. It helped break down ambiguous product decisions, challenge feature creep, write safer targeted changes, and turn GrowChi from a basic habit tracker into a more intelligent wellness companion.

Without Codex, I would not have been able to build and launch a live MVP, let alone prepare a mobile app for launch in the coming weeks. It has also meant I have not had to rush into finding a technical co-founder before I properly understand the product and technical foundations myself.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge has been staying true to the original vision of making healthy habits genuinely fun.

It would have been easy to keep adding features, tracking and dashboards. Instead, every product decision came back to one question:

Does this make someone want to come back tomorrow?

Finding the balance between meaningful behaviour change and a playful experience has been the hardest and most rewarding part of building Growchi.

Testing with early users has also been invaluable. Their feedback has shaped everything from the companion personality to the reward system, reinforcing that emotional connection matters far more than simply collecting more data.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

One of the most rewarding parts of building Growchi so far has been the response from early users. The beta feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, with people quickly understanding what Growchi is and, as importantly, what it is not trying to be. Seeing people form an emotional attachment to their Chi validated the core hypothesis behind Growchi far more than any usage metric could.

Beyond individual users, I've also had encouraging conversations with local authorities, schools and community organisations. There is clear interest in how Growchi could be used within their wellbeing programmes to support healthier lifestyles in a more engaging and consistent way.

What we learned

This project has shown me how AI can dramatically lower the barrier to building software, speed up the development lifecycle and bring fun ideas to life. AI has fundamentally changed what an individual founder can build.

As someone without a technical background, I've gone from an idea to a live product with real users. More importantly, I've learned that the hardest part isn't building AI. It's designing an experience that people genuinely enjoy and want to return to every day.

What's next for GrowChi

Launch Growchi on iOS and Android, grow an engaged community of early users, partner with wellbeing brands and prove that AI companions can help people build healthier habits through emotional connection rather than guilt or endless tracking. Make people healthier and happier!

Growchi is only just getting started, and I'm excited to continue building a wellbeing companion that people truly care about.

Built With

  • capacitor
  • codex
  • digitalhealth
  • gamification
  • netlify
  • openai
  • react
  • supabase
  • typescript
  • vite
  • wellness
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