The hardest part of the morning isn't the tremor. It's the hour that has no shape.

why this exists

One of the four people building Cadenza has Parkinson's. He's building it while he has it.

There's a version of this page that opens with a promise. This one opens with a shirt button.

It took me fifteen minutes.

One button. Standing at the mirror, fifteen minutes, and by the end of it I was furious at a piece of plastic the size of a dime. Angrier at myself, which is the part nobody warns you about.

A few days later: same shirt, same button, same hands.

It took no time at all.

Nothing had changed about the disease. What changed was that I'd stopped fighting the button. I breathed first. I told myself it was okay. I was in the room instead of somewhere out ahead of it, already angry about being late.

I'm not going to insult you by calling that a cure. It isn't one. Some mornings the fifteen minutes come back anyway, and no amount of breathing sends them away.

But those two mornings taught me something nobody had told me, and it's the reason this company exists. Being present is a skill. Skills fade when you stop practicing them. And almost nobody practices at seven in the morning, alone, with a shirt in their hands.

Everything else on this site follows from that morning. The buttons are absurdly large because I have fought small ones. Nothing has a countdown timer, because a clock makes a slow hand slower. You can quit any session halfway through and come back three weeks later to find it waiting, no questions about where you've been, because I have needed exactly that and never once been given it.

I only know my own version of this. Yours will be different. But we built the thing that would have been in the room with me.

— One of the four founders of Cadenza. He'll tell you his name when he's ready.

the part nobody plans for

Some days the hardest part isn't doing the thing. It's starting it.

Not because you don't want to. Because starting takes something that isn't always there, and no amount of deciding to try harder puts it back.

That's why Cadenza starts for you. The nudge arrives on its own. You never have to open an app, or work out what you ought to be doing, or find the will to begin.

It's already begun. All that's left is to say yes, or not today.

You can be a Warrior in general and Off-Duty on a Tuesday. Cadenza won't argue and it won't guilt you. When you're Off-Duty it stops asking you to do things and simply asks what you want — a joke, some music, or nothing at all, just company.

Rest is never a failure here. That isn't a feature we added. It's the reason the rest of it exists.

an honest disqualification

Cadenza is the wrong product for some people, and we'd rather say so now.

If you want a symptom tracker, don't buy this. There are good ones and this isn't one of them, on purpose. We think turning your life into a line graph makes most people feel worse, and we're not willing to build it even though it would probably sell better.

If you want a dashboard your neurologist can log into, this isn't that either. What you say here belongs to you. Not to us, and not to a clinic.

If you want something that pushes hard on the days you can't get up — that nags, scores, and makes you feel behind — you will find Cadenza far too gentle, and you should buy something else.

We'd rather have a thousand people who want exactly this than fifty thousand who wanted something else and are disappointed.