One question changed everything.
Like over half the population, I was tired of the same cycle: snooze, snooze again, promise myself "tomorrow I'll wake up on the first alarm." And then tomorrow would come and nothing changed.
What if I made an alarm that literally couldn't turn off unless you got up?
That question turned into Upp, the first alarm system powered by visual AI. Your alarm won't stop until you prove you're actually standing up and out of bed, or completing whatever action you choose: push-ups, squats, planks, or steps.
Quit the app. Click your phone off. Hit the volume buttons. Silence the ringer. It won't matter. The only way to stop our alarms is to complete the action.
Building that required over a year of engineering and research. Our visual AI tracks your body's skeletal movement and joint angles in real time, confirming the exact motion required with precision. No recordings. No stored video. No cloud. No internet. Everything happens entirely on your device.
Upp was never just an alarm clock.
We set out to build real habits by requiring real actions. That led us to the second application of our technology and one of the defining behavioral epidemics of our generation: dooms crolling.
Select any app, set a screen-time limit, and require a physical action to unlock more time. Do 30 seconds of planks for 5 more minutes on Instagram. Now scrolling isn't free anymore. You have to earn it.
The mechanism is the same. The outcome is the same. The habit builds the same way, one small, deliberate action at a time.
The science is exactly why it works.
At its core, Upp is built around one well-established principle from behavioral neuroscience:
The brain repeats behaviors that require effort and produce reward. That's how discipline is actually built.
For most of human history, reward required action. We hunted, built, gathered, and worked for everything meaningful. The dopamine response evolved as a signal: effort led to reward, and reward reinforced the effort.
Today, most of our strongest dopamine triggers require zero effort. Social media, notifications, endless content. Reward arrives instantly, and the brain adapts to expect it with no work required.
Over time, this reshapes behavior in predictable ways:
- → Procrastination increases. Snoozing becomes the automatic response to any friction.
- → Motivation erodes as the brain learns effort is optional.
- → Discipline becomes harder to sustain. Not because of weakness, but because the reward system got hijacked.
Upp restores the original equation. Instead of reward with no effort, we return to the pattern the brain was built for:
Stand up, alarm stops. Do your push-ups, screen time unlocked. Movement, progress. Small actions, repeated daily, rebuild the action-reward loop that drives real momentum.
Because the first win of the day matters more than people realize. Waking up when you said you would. Resisting the impulse to open TikTok before your feet hit the floor. Those moments are small but they compound. And over time, they change how you see yourself.
Upp will get you upp. Out of bed. Out of the scroll hole. Because the gap between the person you are and the person you want to be comes down to one thing:
Doing the action.
- BB