FirstBorn: Male Fertility

Men's sperm count is down 50% in the last 30 years. FirstBorn teaches you how to get it back up.

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Inspiration

I am at that age were friends are starting to have kids or, in our case, try to have kids. Alarmingly, of about 8 couples who have admitted to trying for kids so far 5 including my wife and I haven't been successful yet.

We all here the stats. Sperm counts are down 50% since 50 years ago. But, like, what does that mean?

Well, back in May I started to investigate.

Turns out, it's not just plastic or air pollution or any single thing. It's actually a bunch of smaller things and a few bigger things like age, exercise, timing, and drugs. Yes, those drugs. But also. Not those drugs. Weed and alcohol both contribute to infertility. But surprisingly the more normal drugs for 30 years olds are often to blame. Hair loss drugs, anti depressants, testosterone injections, the list is long and we are at peak prescription.

After diving down this rabbit hole I realized just about every man has at least a few habits reducing his fertility not to mention attempt timing. So, this is really an education problem and then an issue of having a lifetime of fertility reducing habits....seems solvable?

So I made this app for my wife, myself, and my friends to all have kids together.

What it does

First it asks you a bunch of questions about your habits, age, lifestyle, body mass, etc. Then it puts all of these factors together into a score to assess your general fertility level purely based on your lifestyle habits.

I worked with our OBGYN to tweak some of the numbers especially around the effects of weed and alcohol. (Turns out increased marijuana use is one of the main fertility reducing factors she sees in her practice)

How we built it

I designed it in Figma and had my wife illustrate the initial artwork in procreate. Then I took those designs and implemented the PRD in claude first with codex doing more technical work like the scoring system and revenue cat integration.

All built in swift. There is no backend. I'm using this app too. A lot of this data is super sensitive, so it's stored on just your device. If you want to save it you can explort to icloud or a CSV.

I actually built the initial version just for myself and a few friends in June and kept it on testflight till I saw the Shipaton hackathon and decided to publish it for this.

Challenges we ran into

I was a bit ambitious. I wanted to do too much and add too many features, but ultimately it is a lot of surface area to QA. Especially when there are so many permutations of different scores and notes, etc. Reigning it in to get something launch able and usable was the most hardest part thing. Then iterating on feedback over the last couple of month.

Finally marketing has been tough. Ironically I used to be a director of marketing at a startup, but I'm just a bit too camera shy to show up and put my face out there to let other potential dad's that they could probably save themselves hundreds of dollars in OBGYN visits and tests if they just exercise, sleep better, and void alcohol for 3 months.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Building the app and already having our first confirmed pregnancy from a user in our friend group of that early testflight version back in June.

What we learned

Male fertility problem is mostly an education issue along with maybe a bit of overmedication. Not sure how many guys were taking hair pills in the '70's. But certainly fewer than today.

But in all seriousness it really comes down to age, exercise, and then substances. And among our friends age is the biggest contributing factors were stress, sleep, weed, alcohol, and timing. Woman track their period, but often don't pay attention to peak fertile periods. But when trying those are the only real days that matter. 8% odds per fertile period for an average person.

Anyways, this whole fertility thing is fascinating...but mostly because it feels very solvable but we put our education on sex education to avoid getting pregnant that when it's time to get pregnant us guys just didn't know what we had to do.

What's next for FirstBorn: Male Fertility

Win this hackathon and then use the funds to have a few influencer woman talk about the male side of the fertility crisis and how to get their men to show up for their trying journey.

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