Episode overview

Steve Grace sits down with Alex Kerr, founder of Kumo Study, to talk about how a personal ADHD experience at university became the foundation for an edtech product that is now working with universities and helping thousands of neurodiverse students find flow in their study. The conversation covers the shame spiral of late ADHD diagnosis, the mechanics of building for a hard-to-research demographic, and what a truly inclusive study tool looks like.

When the structure disappears

Alex sailed through school, including a strong HSC result, without any sign of difficulty. Everything changed at university in New Zealand when she missed a deadline for the first time. The removal of the highly structured school environment, with its syllabi functioning like to-do lists and teachers constantly redirecting students, exposed the executive functioning gap that ADHD creates. She entered what she calls a shame spiral: unable to ask for help because she had never needed it before and did not yet understand why things were falling apart.

She began developing coping mechanisms, mapping her most productive hours to her study schedule, choosing her environment deliberately, and discovering what her sensory profile needed. Borrowing techniques from occupational therapy, she started combining a website blocker, study timer, bookmarking tool, and citation generator into a single Chrome plugin. A student told her the combined tool was particularly helpful for their ADHD. That moment reframed the entire product.

Digitising occupational therapy

Kumo Study’s core approach is to take evidence-based OT techniques and make them accessible through software. The platform helps students set up their sensory environment, manage task chunking through timers, and block distracting sites. One of the more distinctive features on the roadmap is a task menu formatted like a restaurant menu, with appetisers for smaller tasks and mains for larger ones. The format is specifically designed to reduce pathological demand avoidance, a profile common in ADHD and autism where standard to-do lists trigger a fight-or-flight response because the items feel like demands from an authority figure.

The product also addresses dyslexia through colour-adjusted screen modes and manipulating web pages to make text more readable for users who can only process through specific colour backgrounds. Gabby, the co-founder with a neuroscience background, leads all design decisions using neuro-design principles to keep the interface engaging for a demographic whose dopamine system makes novelty wear off fast.

Building with a hard-to-research demographic

One of the biggest challenges in building Kumo Study was user research. ADHD is defined by a dopamine deficiency that makes sustained focus difficult, so getting users to complete feedback sessions or iterative testing was genuinely hard. Alex ran university trials to build a reliable feedback loop and worked with students to co-design features. The insight that the product had real value for ADHD students came from a user, not from the founders, which Alex describes as the moment everything clicked into focus for her.

Bootstrapped and growing with universities

Kumo Study has been built without external funding. Alex worked out of her own resources, including a part-time nannying job during university that she restructured to align with her most productive study hours. The platform is now partnering with universities, which provides a distribution channel that reaches the target demographic directly at the point where ADHD difficulties tend to become acute: the transition from structured secondary school to independent tertiary study.