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22 April 2026 · Jarrod
Hello from PBHero
Why we're building a personal-best tracker for young athletes, and what 'building in the open' means here.
Why we're building a personal-best tracker for young athletes, and what 'building in the open' means here.
Spent a lot of this last year on touchlines and pool decks watching my daughters race. There's a very specific look on their faces when they've just beaten their own time — and I've been trying to figure out how to make that feeling stick.
The trouble is Personal Bests live in their heads. A number from a meet in September, another from last weekend, no line connecting them. I wanted to make the progress real — something they can see, not just remember.
So I've been building them an app.
PBHero is a personal-best tracker for young athletes, built for parents. Track every result across track, field, swimming and anything else you can time, measure or count. Every attempt becomes part of a visible story of growth. Every PB earns a petal on their hero sigil and a landmark on their personal island. Every moment is theirs to keep — on device, forever.
Every attempt counts, not just the fast ones. The app is grounded in self-determination theory — autonomy, competence, relatedness. Prompts are optional. Reflections are never gated or rewarded with shards. Consistency matters more than the podium.
Privacy is a feature, not an afterthought. Everything PBHero stores lives on your iPhone. On-device transcription for voice reflections. No analytics, no servers syncing child data, no tracking pixels. We care about this because you should too.
Premium funds the work, not the features. PBHero is free for one child, with every event, every insight, every reflection unlocked. Premium adds room for the whole family plus a reward shop, progression chart and CSV exports. We take the promise "your child's PBs are yours forever" literally — free or Premium.
I'll post here when we ship anything worth sharing — new features, design decisions, things I'm learning from testers, things that didn't work. If you've got a kid who cares about 0.3 seconds, I'd love to hear what you'd want from an app like this.
— Jarrod