Why we built myna

Most product stories are tidy. Founder spots problem, builds clean solution, victory lap.

myna’s start was less tidy, and slightly humiliating.

For years I was a systems integrator. Residential and hospitality control systems: lighting, AV, climate. I have handed over hotels where the room knows you have walked into it. Then I went home to a flat where nobody could reliably tell me what time swimming was, including me.

It took longer than I would like to admit to notice the shape of that.

Nobody arrived. The tuition centre auntie called me. I was in a meeting. Apologies all around.

That’s when I started writing things down.

The thing I kept hitting

I run a Singapore household. That sentence does more work than it looks. Two young kids, one in primary school and one still in kindergarten. A helper, and a run of helpers before her, Filipino then Myanmar then two Indonesian, each of whom I had to learn to be understood by from scratch. Enrichment classes. Doctor’s appointments. The aircon servicing guy. The fact that someone has to remember whose laundry is whose.

The tools I had:

• WhatsApp. Four group chats, half of them muted, the most important messages buried under cooking photos and forwarded panic-news.
• Google Calendar. Works for me, and for nobody else in the household. Definitely not for the helper.
• Smart speaker. Fine for “set a timer”, useless for “tell the small one to brush his teeth at 9 sharp.”
• Screens generally. The thing every parent I know negotiates with nightly, and loses.
• The small one had no way to reach me at all. Too young for a phone, which is correct, and therefore uncontactable between drop-off and dinner. I only noticed how much that bothered me after it stopped being true.

None of these were built for the household I actually had. They were built for individuals who happen to live near each other.

Who actually runs this house

The household is not mine. My wife runs it, and has final say on anything to do with the kids, which is the correct allocation of authority.

She is the planner. She finds the books on Carousell and in Popular. She makes sure they eat properly. She books the holidays that turn out, years later, to have been the good ones. When I was a kid my socks had holes in them; my children’s wardrobe is trendy and functional, and that is entirely her doing and none of mine. She is the one who notices they are ready for something before they are, and she is the one they want when they are sick or sad.

I am the stern one. Discipline master, quirky Gen X division.

Which means I built a coordination tool for a household I do not actually run. The only test that has ever mattered is whether it works for her.

What I wanted

A house that runs itself a little.

Not a smart home. Not voice-AI-magic. Something simpler: a thing that knows the routines, knows the people, and knows when the grandparents need to be looped in but the helper doesn’t.

Something where everyone who needs today’s plan can see it without learning a new app. Where my helper could send a voice note in Bahasa and I’d hear it in English without copy-pasting through Google Translate. Where a kid’s screen isn’t a portal to whatever the algorithm picked.

Why Aunty

Every Singapore household has an Aunty in it somewhere. Sometimes she’s literal: your mum’s friend, the one who runs the kopitiam, the block neighbour who knows everyone’s kids by name. Sometimes she’s metaphorical: the voice in your head that says “aiyo, you didn’t bring umbrella ah?”

Aunty is the operating system of family life here. She nags without scolding, knows everyone’s schedule, switches between English and Mandarin and a bit of Hokkien depending on who she’s talking to. She’s the most underrated UX pattern in the world and nobody’s ever shipped her in software.

So we did.

Aunty in myna isn’t a generic assistant. She’s a character, and there is a whole cast of them: Peranakan Aunty, Tiger Ah Ma, Mak Cik, Tamil Amma. Pick the one that sounds like someone in your family. She narrates the chores. She announces the dinner call. She translates between you and your helper and somehow makes both sides feel respected.

When she nags my son to brush his teeth, it lands different than a notification.

What actually changed, in my own house

I built this for me first, which means I am both the least objective person to tell you about it and the only one who has been living with it daily. Four things surprised me, and none of them were on the roadmap.

The nightly screen argument stopped being nightly. Not because the limits are cleverer than anyone else’s, but because they’re enforced by the home screen rather than by me at 9pm. I lose that argument roughly half the time when it’s mine to win. Now it isn’t mine.

My five-year-old can reach me. He can’t use a phone and shouldn’t have one, but he can now get to me in the middle of a working day. I had quietly accepted being uncontactable to him for eight hours as a normal feature of employment. It turns out I minded a lot, and I only found that out once it changed.

My daughter started doing her Kumon on time. This one I did not design. She photographs each page so I can see nothing was skipped, and sends it over. I expected mild compliance. What happened was that she took it over. The homework goes in on time, with an unreasonable number of emojis attached, because sending it became the fun part rather than the audit part. Accountability turned into a small daily performance, which at eight is a much better trade.

Aunty became the household’s memory, mostly for boring things. The kids’ logins. The warranties. When the helper’s passport expires. My son’s more unhinged quotes, filed under his name because otherwise they evaporate.

And the one that still makes me laugh: I sent Aunty my daughter’s school timetable once. Now, at dinner the night before, the tablet tells her whether it’s PE tomorrow, in a voice she finds funny, while she’s within earshot and I am doing something else entirely. That’s the whole product, really. Not intelligence. Somebody remembering the PE uniform out loud, at the moment it’s useful, so it isn’t me.

The kids like her. That was the bit I was least sure about and most needed.

What we’d defend if a VC told us to cut it

The helper translation feature.

Most “smart family” products skip helpers entirely. They treat the household as parents + kids and stop there. In Singapore, that’s not the household. There are 280,000 helpers in this country. They’re family-adjacent in a real, structural way, and the tools we use treat them like an afterthought. Auto-translation isn’t a nice-to-have here. It’s the difference between “ok mam” meaning okay and “ok mam” meaning “I have no idea what you just said and I don’t want to disappoint you.”

Anyone who tells us to cut that hasn’t lived in a SG flat.

Where this goes

We built myna for the family we have. The chaotic, multi-tongued, tuition-stacked, Aunty-led one. We’re shipping it slowly, with families who put up with our half-finished features and tell us when something doesn’t feel right.

If that sounds like your house, come try it.

Aunty’s already inside, waiting to nag.