The day we brought our daughter home from the hospital, my husband and I carried her together over the threshold of our house and I immediately collapsed into a weepy puddle of emotions. I viscerally remember the feeling I had - a mix of intense joy, sparkling excitement, and a small but growing pit in my stomach. My head started pounding, and it sounded like a drumbeat of one phrase repeated over and over: "This is amazing! What do I do? Oh my god. What do I do??"

In the course of the last six months, the Riley team and I have spoken to over 200 families of young children and learned about their lives, the challenges they've faced, and the unexpected joys that have come with the journey into and through parenthood. Every family that we've spoken to has said some version of the same thing to us: "Parenthood is amazing, and I was not prepared for what it's really like."

A few weeks ago, we officially announced our powerful new app that gives new parents 🚀superpowers 🚀. Since announcing Riley publicly, the question we're asked most often (besides "Is Riley your daughter's name?", which, no, but wouldn't that be sweet?) is: "how did you come up with this idea, and why do you all feel so passionately about solving problems for new parents?"

Whenever I'm asked this question, I recall the feeling I had when we brought our daughter home, and the difficult few weeks that followed. I remember waking up in a cold sweat every night at 3am and wondering, "Is she okay? Am I okay? When will this get better?". I look back on that version of myself with the same tenderness I feel when I look at my now two year-old. Why are we building Riley, you ask? We're building it to help that new mom, and for all parents of young kids who are doing something amazing and impossible together. We're building it for you.

How (And Why!) Riley Was Born

I found the transition to parenthood very, very difficult in a way that made me feel ashamed and embarrassed. Those who know me well know that I'm a very Type A - a career product manager, engineer, people manager, you name it. Preparation and organization are my stock and trade.

I've always, always wanted to be a mother, and when my husband, Sebastian (also a product manager), and I decided that we were ready to have children, we looked forward to this new phase of our lives with excitement, and immediately started making plans. Pretty quickly, we had the first five years of our future child's life planned out - our childcare situation, where they would go to preschool, where we would travel with them, etc.

Right away, things did not go according to the beautiful and meticulous plans we'd cooked up. To start, it took a long time to actually get pregnant, which was not on my bingo card and was a hiccup that left us feeling frustrated and fatigued. And then, when we finally did conceive, I was immediately hit with hyperemesis gravidarum, or medically severe morning sickness. Hyperemesis is about as much fun as it sounds, and it stayed with me for 20 weeks while I went about my life and tried to cling to whatever shreds of normalcy I could.

Once the hyperemesis subsided, Sebastian and I went back to making plans and trying to envision what our lives would be like once our daughter was born. We read all the books, watched all the courses, took breastfeeding classes and infant CPR classes and learned how to transfer a carseat in and out of our Mini Cooper. We thought we had prepared about as well as anyone possibly could for parenthood. If you're a parent, you already know where this is headed - because it's impossible to know what it'll be like when you hit the postpartum phase for the first time, and no amount of preparation can really ready you for that transition.

When my daughter was born, I was hit with the double-whammy of postpartum depression and postpartum anxiety, conditions that affect more than 25% of new moms (this figure is likely underreported given the stigma around PPA/PPD). PPA/PPD are impossible to prepare for and very, very difficult to live with. I couldn't eat, and I couldn't sleep, even though I desperately needed to. Every night when I would finally calm myself down enough to drift off, I would hallucinate that I had fallen asleep while holding my daughter and that I had accidentally dropped her off of the bed and onto the ground. This nightmare was so lifelike that I would wake up on the floor of my bedroom desperately searching for the phantom baby who was, in actuality, safely resting her in bassinet. I had this nightmare every single night for more than a month.

In the meantime, Sebastian and I were logging everything our daughter was doing - diapers, nursing sessions, bottles, sleep, you name it. As new parents, we wanted to make sure we were doing everything right, and we were most concerned with whether our baby was doing okay and eating/sleeping enough. We used just about every tracking app available on the app store, but quickly found that existing tools were difficult to use, terrible to look at, and overall frustrating to navigate.

All the while, I would wake up after my PPA nightmares in a cold sweat with a million questions: "Am I doing this right? How long should my daughter be feeding? Why won't she sleep for more than 30 minutes at a time? When does this get better?". Everyone I would have normally called or texted for advice - our pediatrician, my mom, my sister, our friends - were asleep, because it was 3am and they didn't have a newborn.

We quickly found that Googling for answers was an exercise in extreme frustration. Google search results were so general and vague that they required some serious brainpower to frankenstein into a solution that would actually work for our situation, for our daughter. Reddit was full of armchair experts confusing anecdotes with data, and I had to quit Instagram completely lest I go completely insane reading another post about "well this is just what works for our family, no worries if you can't breastfeed until your kids are seven." I revisited the books and courses, but quickly found that my sleep-deprived brain was not up to the task of watching a 5 hour course about how to get my newborn to sleep.

What I really wanted was for someone who knew the science, saw all the data I was logging, and who knew ME and my family to tell me what I needed to know. I wanted that person to read the studies, watch the classes, and then tell me what I needed to know for my unique situation so I didn't have to go through and do all of that work myself when I was least capable of doing so.

Riley Becomes Reality

Fortunately, things got better rapidly after my PPD/PPA was diagnosed and treated. I stopped having anxiety nightmares, my daughter started sleeping better, and Sebastian and I felt like we were beginning to get the hang of things. Even so, I couldn't shake the idea that had lodged itself in my brain - that I wanted a companion who could fit itself into my life and help me spend more time doing the things I wanted to be doing, like playing with and enjoying my daughter, and less time worrying whether or not I was doing it right.

And, as any parent will tell you, the volume of questions I had about my daughter and parenting didn't subside, but the nature of the questions did. After a few months, we stopped tracking diapers and began to focus more on sleep and milestone acquisition. Even today, I turn to Riley at least once a day with a question about tantrums, picky eating, and bedtime battles - things that were foreign to me as the new mom of a newborn, but that are now part of my everyday parenting experience. And Riley meets me where I am, proactively suggesting fun weekend activities for us to do here in San Francisco via push notification, preparing me for upcoming pediatric visits, and anticipating our needs as a growing family of three.

And so, Riley was born - the idea that first took hold almost two years ago and wouldn't let go has turned into a companion for the ~10 million families with children under 5. Riley is the parenting ally I wished I had when I was a brand-new mom, and I find myself talking to our designers and engineers and building features that I can't wait to use right now. And this is a refrain that we have heard in every single one of our many, many conversations with families of young kids - no matter their situation, the age of their kids, where they live, or how many kids they have, every single family has asked us why we didn't launch this product yesterday. Parents clearly have a need here, and we cannot wait to introduce Riley more broadly so that we can help as many parents as possible.

Riley is the first - and only! - parenting/baby tracking app that learns and grows with your family, providing personalized, science-backed guidance to help you feel confident, supported, and ready for anything that life - or your kids - throws your way. I consider myself user zero, and it has been thrilling to build a product that I actually use every single day.

So, if you're a new parent who is transitioning to parenthood for the first time or a seasoned parent of 5 under 5, Riley will get to know you and fit itself seamlessly to your parenting journey, learning about your preferences, needs, and your family so you can feel like the most confident version of yourself with much, much less work.

No more late-night Google spirals or juggling 50 different parenting apps. No more 10 hour courses or 300 page books covering every possible edge. Riley is your all-in-one solution for personalized parenting support, empowering you to make confident decisions for your family.

Ready to unlock your parenting superpowers? Join our waitlist now!!
And, for the new parents out there: it really does get better!!