The Independent Android App Outsmarting Billion-Dollar Scrolling Habits.
Paced replaces rigid phone punishments with a simple, choice-based system that helps busy people reclaim their daily focus without feeling penalized.
Recent Press Highlights
« J’ai passé trois mois sur Instagram hier soir. Cette boutade vous interpelle ?
Paced est pour vous. » "I spent three months on Instagram last night. Does this joke resonate with you? Paced is for you." — Alain McKenna, La Presse
"The Paced app turns steps into screen time." — Matthew Mountjoy, MobileSyrup
Why Paced is Different
"You’re not lazy. You’re just fighting a supercomputer with a human brain."
Most screen-time apps are "Digital Jailers." They punish you, block you, and shame you for having no willpower.
Paced is the world’s first "Compassionate Pattern Interrupt."
The problem isn't your willpower; it's the 'Infinite Scroll.' We don't doomscroll because we are lazy; we do it to numb out. We check our phones to avoid overwhelm, stress, or boredom, and suddenly an hour is gone.
Paced introduces healthy friction. By trading scrolling for strolling, it physically changes your state, stopping the passive consumption so you can get back to active living.
How It Works: Wait vs. Walk
Most screen-time apps lock you out entirely when your limit is up. Paced does something completely different: it interrupts your scroll, initiates a lockout timer, and gives you a choice.
You can either sit and wait out the clock, or you can walk to unlock it faster.
The Interrupt: Paced catches you when you try to open a distracting app, snapping you out of the autopilot trance.
The Timer: The app locks you out for a set duration,
The Shortcut: Don't want to wait? You can physically walk to speed up the timer and regain access.
The Golden Ratio: 100 Steps = 3 Minutes of Time.
This physical action snaps the user out of the "scrolling trance" and gives them a moment of conscious awareness to decide: "Do I really want to scroll, or should I get back to living?"
The Spark: A Facebook Post, a Podcast, and AI.
The seed for Paced was planted months before the app was ever built. In January 2025, Rhonda noticed a massive flaw in standard screen time apps: users could blow through their entire daily time limit in one sitting.
She posted a simple question to her Facebook network: "What if an app locked you out, but let you earn time back sooner if you got a minimum amount of steps?" The concept resonated immediately, proving there was a real market gap.
The Catalyst
The idea sat until July, when Rhonda listened to an episode of Mel Robbins discussing the neurobiology of phone addiction. Suddenly, the science backed up her January Facebook post: Digital locks fail because they don't require physical friction to bypass.
The Execution
That same afternoon, she walked into her local favorite, TOT Cafe in Saskatoon, opened her laptop, and went to work.
Treating AI (Google's Gemini) as her fractional C-Suite, she spent the next few hours hashing out the concept. Before she left the cafe, she had:
Verified the market gap she found in January.
Locked in the "Paced" name.
Secured the web domains and social handles.
Mapped out the core "Wait vs. Walk" mechanic for her developers.
Paced By The Numbers
Elite 40% Daily Engagement Ratio: Out of all active devices, nearly 40% of users rely on Paced every single day to protect their focus.
99.96% Crash-Free Experience: Flawless background stability delivering a reliable tool that does its job without draining your battery.
Organic International Scaling: Active, user-supported growth across 11 countries without a corporate marketing budget,
The Founder Story: Rhonda Lavoie
"I built Paced because I realized willpower is a losing battle against billion-dollar algorithms."
Rhonda Lavoie is a top-producing Real Estate Agent in Saskatoon, SK, with over 12 years of industry experience. As a busy professional balancing a demanding career and family life, she designed Paced to solve her own struggle with mid-afternoon screen fatigue. Instead of hiring an expensive tech firm, she used AI tools to help her manage an international development team and bring the app to life. Rhonda is dedicated to helping driven people protect their daily focus and mental energy, proving that true productivity is measured by real-world presence, not screen time.
From the Prairies to the Play Store
The Solo Founder Bootstrapping a Cure for Doomscrolling
Rhonda is a solo, non-technical founder based in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Frustrated by her own doomscrolling habits and the lack of effective tools on the market, she decided to architect the solution herself.
To bridge the technical gap without VC funding, she leveraged AI (Google’s Gemini) as her strategic partner—using it to translate complex developer documentation, run market analysis, and seamlessly manage an international development team.
Today, Paced is proving that with extreme resourcefulness and the right tools, a solo founder can build a highly-retained, habit-changing product that rivals Silicon Valley.
Media Inquiries
For interviews, review copies, or high-res assets:
Rhonda Lavoie