We built this for us. The midwives and doulas told us we were onto something.

This isn’t a startup story.

The Beginning

We started trying to build our family later than most. By the time we were ready, we were in our mid-forties and knew the clock was...well, different for us. What we didn’t know was how many twists the road still had, or how much we would learn about what it means to support someone through a long, uncertain process.

After months of trying naturally we found ourselves in a fertility clinic going through the numbers. At our age the statistics aren’t on your side, but statistics don’t know your story. We kept showing up, kept hoping, kept trying to be present for each other through every cycle. Above all else, we kept the mantra, "it just takes one."

The Four Rounds

IVF is not one journey, for us it was four separate journeys, and each one carries its own kind of hope and its own kind of heartbreak. Across four retrieval cycles we watched numbers go up and down, low sperm motility, follicle counts, egg counts, fertilization rates, blastocyst grades, and each number carried the weight of a possibility that might or might not materialize.

By round four we had learned not to get our hopes up too early. And then, on a phone call in June of last year, everything changed. The nurse told us we had one embryo that had made it through every gate. The genetic testing came back normal. They gave it a grade that became a nickname: two letters that would mean everything to us from that moment forward.

The Transfer

The transfer was in October. Thirteen days later we got the blood test back and stared at the HCG number on the screen. We had spent so long looking at numbers that didn’t go our way that seeing one that finally did took a minute to register. It was real. We were pregnant.

A month after that we saw the heartbeat. A flicker on an ultrasound screen that rewired everything. In that moment we went from being two people navigating a medical process to being parents, and the shift was instant and total. We started thinking about what we would actually need when the baby arrived.

Why We Built This

When we looked for resources for the person doing the supporting, we found excellent ones. Penny Simkin's The Birth Partner is a remarkable book, and it was the foundation of everything we built. But during labor itself, when you're in a dim room at 3 AM and things are moving fast, a book is hard to use. You can't flip through pages while holding a hand and timing contractions. You need something that meets you where you are and tells you what you could do to help in that moment.

And then we had our baby. She arrived in June, two weeks early, because babies don’t read birth plans and they certainly don’t read due dates. Everything we built got tested in real time during her arrival, and we learned a hundred things we couldn’t have learned any other way. We’ve been updating the app ever since, and we’ll keep updating it as we figure out what comes next.

This is the app we needed. We hope it helps you be the support your person needs.

With love and solidarity,

—Cole and Aji