Built by someone who could not put his phone down.

I have ADHD, and I have always had more ideas than hours.

The laptop would close, the lights would go off, and my phone would come to bed with me.

Five more minutes. Then another five. I would look up and it would be gone midnight, again.

I was not lazy, and I was never short of goals. I just could not stop the one thing standing between me and them.

Before SETL, I was a nine figure copywriter. I wrote for brands including JD Sports and Manchester United.

My job was attention. Find the line that stops a thumb mid scroll, then keep it there.

I learned the psychology from the inside. Curiosity. Reward. The quiet pull of just one more.

I was good at it. Which meant I understood exactly what was happening to me every night.

So I stepped out of it. Now I want to help everyone else step out too, because it is built to be addictive.

Look around any group of friends after ten at night. Faces lit blue, half in the conversation.

Mine were ambitious people in demanding jobs, in offices and on building sites and in their own businesses. They were also exhausted, and quietly blaming themselves for it.

Tired eyes. Headaches by Thursday. Mornings that started already behind.

I had spent time in the health supplement world, where you learn fast to separate a study from a sales pitch.

The sleep research was not subtle. Bright screens in the evening push your body clock later.

In one well known study, people who read on a tablet before bed took longer to fall asleep, produced less melatonin and felt less alert the next morning than when they read a paper book.

In 2025, researchers following 45,202 young adults found that every extra hour on a screen in bed came with about 24 fewer minutes of sleep.

And in the daytime, attention researcher Gloria Mark found we now hold focus on one screen for around 47 seconds before switching.

App timers I snoozed. Screen Time limits I dismissed with one tap. Grayscale mode that lasted about a week.

I tried routines, breathing, reading in bed. Some nights I reached for sleep aids, and I did not want that to become the plan.

At midnight, the tired version of me lost every single time. Every fix had the same flaw.

The idea was simple. Make the decision once, in daylight, when you are thinking clearly.

Then let the phone go to sleep first, so there is nothing left to argue with at midnight.

I put my own money and a great deal of time into building it, as a young founder with no big company behind me.

SETL (say it like settle) is the result. A sleep app blocker, built night first, that looks after your daytime focus too.