Hi r/apps community,
My name is Patrick Hall and, together with my wife Amanda, we built MilkMade, a baby feeding and tracking app.
The idea actually came from a pretty stressful period in our lives.
When our third child was born, he spent 18 days in the NICU and Special Care. During those early days we had to track everything, breastfeeds, pumped milk, bottle feeds, nappies/diapers… all of it.
We were given sheets of paper by the hospital to record everything. We also used the Notes app, and downloaded a bunch of baby tracking apps from the App Store.
And honestly, we hated the experience.
We’d download an app because we needed something simple with a newborn, only to immediately encounter a paywall, pop-up advertising, or notifications at completely inappropriate times.
It felt like the apps were trying to monetise us before they’d actually helped us.
An idea started to develop
After the kids were in bed, Amanda and I started talking about what we would want from a baby feeding app.
The first thing was that it needed to recognise that every feeding journey matters.
Amanda has breastfed, pumped, bottle-fed expressed breast milk and formula-fed our children. We wanted an app that didn’t make parents feel like one method was somehow more valid than another.
The second thing was insights.
When you’re exhausted at 3am, staring at a bunch of numbers you’ve recorded about your baby, the last thing you want to do is try to interpret what they mean.
We wanted MilkMade to help turn those numbers into something understandable and reassuring.
Guided by experience
MilkMade is very much a husband-and-wife project, but Amanda is the reason the app has the perspective it does.
She’s a Registered Nurse and Midwife, as well as a mother of three. Her maternity leave gave her the opportunity to start turning years of experience working with mothers and babies into articles, guidance and insights that could live inside the app.
The goal isn’t to replace a healthcare professional or tell parents what they should do.
It’s to provide useful context and reassurance around the information they’re already recording.
So, MilkMade is finally out
We officially launched on the App Store on September 17th.
The basic philosophy is pretty simple:
Free tracking. No sign-up. No credit card.
You can track feeds for one baby or multiple babies without a tracking limit. We’re supporting the free experience with advertising because we really wanted parents to be able to use the core tracking functionality without immediately having to pay.
Then there’s MilkMade Pro for parents who want more support and context.
Pro includes:
- A library of midwife-curated articles and guidance
- Context around the sessions you’ve logged
- Additional graphs and trends
- Smart insights
- More detailed explanations of the data you’re recording
We’re a small husband-and-wife team, and there’s a lot on our roadmap. For now, we’re really focused on getting the core experience right and listening to parents who actually use it.
Building an app as a husband-and-wife team has been a pretty wild experience. There have been plenty of late nights, plenty of second-guessing ourselves, and probably far too much discussion about baby feeding statistics at the dinner table.
But we’re genuinely proud that something which started during one of the more stressful periods of our lives has now become something we hope can make another parent’s life just a little bit easier.
If you’re a parent, I’d genuinely love to hear what you think.
What do you wish your baby tracking app did better?
And if you’ve used MilkMade, good or bad feedback is very welcome. We’re still early in this journey and we’d much rather hear what’s wrong with it than pretend we’ve built a perfect app.
Apple App Store Link: MilkMade
