Lauren Longo, a UX designer and product manager, found her life as a working parent getting increasingly chaotic after her second child. Between work, family obligations, and chores, she struggled to balance daily tasks and keeping up with the new baby’s milestones.
“We’re doing all of this around the clock in this drastically sleep-deprived energy reserve, while needing to keep up with number of feedings, diaper changes, and sleep training,” says Longo.
Her first instinct was to go to the app store to download a baby tracking app to keep up with all of this data for both the family and their pediatrician.
While that strategy worked during the day, all of the options she found required for her to dig around for her phone at 3 a.m. to enter a middle-of-the-night feeding or diaper change, and she stopped keeping up with it after only a few days.
Longo tried Amazon’s Alexa, but ran into similar inconveniences. But when she used her Amazon dash button for ordering diapers, she realized that’s what she needed.
“I asked my husband, who is in hardware and software engineering, to just hack the button. All I need is an easy button,” she says. “Every time I track one of these things, I don’t want to have to talk to any device or find my phone. Wouldn’t it be nice if I had the option to just press this button and it logs what I’ve done with the baby?”
That’s how Longo and husband John co-founded Babylogger in 2016. They immediately began customer discovery with fellow parents to validate the idea. Together, the couple assembled 25 devices on their kitchen table and distributed them to 25 volunteer families to use for a three-month period.
Each device displayed a collection of eight buttons for the most common baby activities like diaper changing, feeding, and naps.
“We got phenomenal results from the initial pilot. We shipped the homemade device and built the accompanied web app, where you can see all of your data logs and reporting,” says Longo. Once they proved their concept, they brought on a third co-founder, Patrick Caldwell, as CTO.
The hardware can be used by any of the baby’s caretakers — parents, family members, or professional caretakers — to log feedings, diaper changes, naps, etc. with the push of a button. Parents can then keep track of their child’s day while at work as the buttons sync with the app.
“There are a number of reasons, tangible and intangible, that parents want to feel like keeping track of how their baby is doing, how they’re caring for the baby, and how the baby is developing over time,” says Longo.
This data is also critical at pediatricians visits. Parents can pull up a report through the app and give their doctor accurate data, leading to more accurate checkups, milestones, potential diagnoses, and overall health.
The Babylogger team is already thinking beyond baby milestone tracking. Longo shares that after talking to more potential customers, they learned that their product could be useful for anything from pet care, tracking in older children, even to those who board horses. As they begin exploring alternative use cases, they plan to move forward with more inclusive branding later this year.
“It varies person-to-person, but everybody we talked to comes right back with some other way that they would want to use this technology,” says Longo. “We spent a number of months really digging into that and as we’re building the baby activity tracking platform, we’re thinking through how can we make this platform content agnostic and repackage this for other markets?”
In the coming months, the startup is planning a rebrand to “Talli” to scale more widely across markets, introducing customization capability to the hardware so users can track anything they want.
The Atlanta-based startup is also preparing to launch their improved native app next month, along with an Alexa skill, followed by the next version of the hardware later this summer. The app is free to download, with a 30-day trial before requiring a subscription.
They remain bootstrapped and will launch a crowdfunding campaign in the next few months to get the word out and push through the hardware manufacturing costs.
