Solo founder, designer, developer active

Peekabout

A nature scavenger-hunt app that turns family walks into something kids actually want to do. Built solo, designed for parents who want unplugged outdoor time without the boredom complaints.

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Two children and an adult on a woodland path through spring bluebells in dappled light, one child crouched looking closely at something while the adult points up into the trees. Overlaid text reads 'Every walk, an adventure.'

The problem

Family walks are hard to get enthusiasm for. Kids don’t want to “go for a walk.” Younger children start whining early on, asking to be carried or complaining about their legs. Older ones (if you can even get them out of the door), spend the time huffing and puffing and making sure you know this is the biggest inconvenience of their lives.

The market has responded with more screens. Step counters, Pokémon, AR, anything to make the outdoors competitive with a tablet. That works in the short run and undermines the thing the walk was supposed to do in the first place. Parents I spoke to didn’t want a more engaging screen. They wanted a reason for the kids to look up and appreciate the world around them.

The approach

Peekabout generates an engaging and multi-sensory scavenger hunt for whatever walk you’re hoping to go on. Set the ages and the rough environment, and it builds a list of things to spot, listen for, count, or do. Most items are common (a yellow flower, a smooth pebble, a bird singing), pitched to the age band so a 4-year-old isn’t asked to identify warblers and a 13-year-old isn’t asked to find a leaf.

A few principles set early and never compromised:

  • No accounts. Open Peekabout, start a hunt. No sign-up wall, no email harvest.
  • No ads. The product is the product.
  • Works offline. A curated 462-item fallback library means a hunt still works in a wood (or most of Devon) with no signal.
  • Respect the walk. The app is there to start the activity, then get out of the way.

What I built

Peekabout is a Flutter app for iOS and Android, backed by a small Cloudflare Worker that proxies AI hunt generation. The Worker handles prompt-shaping, rate limiting, and caching, so the app can stay thin, fast, and offline-capable. Local data lives in Drift (typed SQLite) and state is managed with Riverpod.

The iOS app went live on the App Store on 30 April, and Android on Google Play on 19 May, alongside the wider launch push.

App screen titled 'Hunt ready' with two large amber buttons: Explore (find items in any order) and Challenge (race the clock). An in-walk hunt screen showing the next item to find, 'A bright yellow flower in the park', with two clue hints, a 'Found it' button, and the rest of the hunt list below. The same hunt screen after marking a find: confetti animation, the timer continuing, and the next item highlighted.

The hunt experience has two modes. Explore lets kids find items in any order, with optional clues if they get stuck. Challenge runs a timer and rewards speed, which suits older children who want a target. Items can be spotted, listened for, counted, or done as small activities, so a four-year-old stacking three pebbles and a thirteen-year-old building a two-person shelter are both legitimate “finds.”

Tech and process

I built Peekabout solo, working alongside Claude Code as a development partner. The advantage isn’t that the AI writes the app, it’s that it removes the lag between “I want to try this” and “this is in the build.” A change that would once have been a Saturday afternoon of plumbing (wiring a new field through the API, the Drift schema, the UI, and the tests) is now a conversation while the kettle boils.

Some things only work because Peekabout is built on top of Sunlight, the design system I built for my daylight-tracking app. The visual language, the dark/light handling, and the typography were all already defined. I spent design time on the things that needed it (the hunt-item card, the celebrate-the-find moment) and reused everything else.

I also didn’t skip the boring parts. Privacy policy that reflects how the app actually behaves. App Store and Play Store metadata that names what the app does honestly. Ensuring the worker fails closed instead of pretending offline-mode is fine when it isn’t. oh, and real-world testing by parents.

Where it is now

Peekabout is live on both the App Store and Google Play, with the full launch push under way.

Get Peekabout on the App Store · Get it on Google Play

Find out more at peekabout.app. If you’d like to support the app and parents wanting to make outdoors fun, the press kit has logos, screenshots, and the founder note.

Find Peekabout online