/daily-startup-idea/cron

“Cron jobs for being a decent person. 0 9 * * * text mom. @weekly compliment their haircut. 0 0 14 2 *remember Valentine’s Day. Missed a run? We execute on next boot with an apology and a topical GIF. Enterprise: PagerDuty when you skip Mother’s Day.”

The Problem

Emotional labor is a batch workload. You’ve been running it on vibes. Vibes has a p99 of “three months late” and a SEV1 every October when you forget your dad’s birthday again.

uptime: your relationshipsSLO: 99.9% · actual: 71.4%

replied on time “omg sorry just seeing this” outage

The Solution

A crontab for your soul. Declarative, versioned, replicable across relationships. crontab -e your way to being loved.

~/.decency.crontabloaded · 14 jobs

0 9 * * *echo "morning ☕" | send --to mom

30 20 * * 5ask --recipient=partner "how was your week honey"

@weeklycompliment --target=$FRIEND_OF_WEEK --topic=haircut

0 18 * * 0call --to=grandma --duration=17min

0 0 14 2 *# valentines. do NOT let this fail.

*/45 * * * *ping --group=chat --msg="lol"

@yearlynew-years-resolution --exit 0 # never runs

0 0 1 1 *# reset "not gonna forget birthdays this year" flag

Failure Modes

MISSED_RUN

You were “in a meeting.” The job runs at 11:47pm with the subject line “still up thinking about you.”

OVERLAPPING_JOBS

Two @daily “how was your day” jobs to the same partner. She notices. You get flagged as a bot.

TZ_DRIFT

Cron runs in UTC. You wish your sister a happy birthday at 3am her time. She has words.

SILENT_FAILURE

Job exited 0 but the message was “k.” Technically shipped. Emotionally, the deploy is on fire.

Pricing

Hobbyist

3 jobs. Runs from a Raspberry Pi under your desk. Fails silently, like you.

Devoted

$14 / mo

Unlimited jobs, retries with exponential apology backoff (2h → 4h → “flowers”).

Marriage

$99 / mo

HA across two nodes (you + a therapist). PagerDuty on Mother’s Day. On-call rotation for anniversaries.

TAM

addressable market · humans who have said “i’ve been meaning to text you”

4.9B adults × 11 dropped pings / wk × $0.28 / on-time nicety

= $786B / yr in unsent good mornings

Methodology: our co-founder’s mother reviewed the deck. She has notes.

The Ask

$2M seed. 60% for a hosted scheduler with better SLAs than your last six situationships. 30% for a compliance layer so nothing you’d never say ships under your name. 10% for a legal opinion on whether call --to=grandmais a deepfake if it’s in your own voice. Series A pitch: “We’re Hallmark, but self-hosted and it never forgets.”