Built a parenting app on paternity leave — baby due any day 🙏
Baby is due literally any day. In the weeks leading up to paternity leave I've been building Sprout — a one-stop-shop for new parents in the UK.
The problem I was trying to solve: Every app for new parents does one thing. Peanut does friend-matching (women only). Happity does classes. Childcare.co.uk does nurseries. Nothing combines the stuff you actually need day-to-day into one place — and nothing includes dads properly.
What Sprout does:
Find other parents nearby with babies the same age
AI assistant you can ask anything at 3am (including sending photos)
Nursery finder with Ofsted ratings
Batch-cook recipes for exhausted people
Baby gear marketplace
Local groups, meetups, stories
Private journal with mood tracking
Deals on baby essentials
Stack: Lovable + Supabase + Claude API + Brave Search + postcodes.io. No native app — PWA only for now.
Where I am: Live, a handful of real users, just started sharing it. Would love feedback from anyone who's been through the new parent stage or has thoughts on the community/local discovery problem.
Replies
PickleMatch
congrats :) from a growth perspective, how are you planning to find new parents? any interesting GTM ideas you're testing?
@anneliese Thanks so much! 🙏
Honestly still early days but a few things we're testing:
The most interesting one is partnering with antenatal class providers companies like Bump & Baby Club who run classes for 20,000 expectant parents a year. They create the community before the baby arrives, we continue it after. The pitch is essentially "Sprout is what keeps your cohort together once the classes end." Early conversations are promising.
Beyond that — hyper-local Facebook groups have been surprisingly engaged, and the marketplace feature is our organic sharing mechanic. When someone lists a free Bugaboo they share it in their WhatsApp groups to find a taker, which brings in people who've never heard of Sprout.
Longer term the moat is density if we can make SW London feel genuinely alive on the app, that's impossible for a national app to replicate.
What's your take have you seen community apps crack the cold start problem in an interesting way?