Having a clear strategy for household chores and checking in regularly is key to a healthy relationship, said Silvia de Denarro Vieira, founder of Coexist, a home-management app designed to help couples share the mental burden.
Vieira, 32, realized she needed the tool when she began living with her boyfriend (now husband), Hugh McFall, in 2022. “We moved in with very high expectations for how often we cleaned and did laundry,” Vieira says. She was shocked by Hugh's lackadaisical attitude toward cleaning their Sunset apartment. She resented his neglect and having to make up for his neglect.
They tried to fix the organizational discrepancies with the software tools they use effectively at work: Asana, Notion, Google Docs, and even Post-it notes. None of it worked. “They all felt very corporate and reminded me of our work,” she said.
Vieira was frustrated. A damning Harvard Business School study found that 25 percent of divorced couples cited domestic discord as the primary reason. “It didn't say anything. [to help]… So I built it myself,” she says. Vieira joined Techstars Oakland after raising $120,000 to build Coexist, a mobile app that left beta in May of this year.
The $6.49/month app has a clean, uncluttered interface and offers shared to-do lists, AI-powered meal plans, shopping lists, and a templates section full of practical documents ranging from mundane to meta. As well as travel packing lists and movie suggestions, there's a “Discussion” template that helps couples map out expectations for living together. Can we bring pets into the house? What about weapons? Shoes indoors? Of course, this is likely to come up early in a relationship, but it's surprisingly easy to forget these details when you're falling in love and your oxytocin levels are high.
“It sounds cheesy. [but] “This is what saved our relationship,” Vieira says. “Now it's not you versus me. It's like you and I are at odds over this thing that we agreed to and set up together.”
