KoonMiMi: Newborn Sleep & Feed

KoonMiMi helps parents understand what their newborn needs next, turning sleep, feeding, and baby cues into simple, evidence-informed guidance, because every family deserves support.

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Inspiration

Newborns can sleep for many hours a day, but often in short, unpredictable stretches. For exhausted parents, the hardest question isn't simply, "How long did my baby sleep?" It's:

What does my baby need right now?

I experienced this firsthand after the birth of my second daughter. Without grandparents or a postpartum caregiver helping us, my husband and I were caring for a newborn while also raising our older daughter.

As a PhD epidemiologist, I did what came naturally: I started researching.

I reviewed scientific literature, professional and public-health guidance, books, and newborn sleep resources. I also tried popular baby sleep apps.

But I ran into a frustrating gap: when my baby was a newborn and I needed the most help, the sleep-prediction features in the apps I tried weren't available until around two months of age.

I could record when she slept, but I still found myself starting a basic phone timer every time she woke up just to keep track of how long she had been awake.

And awake time alone wasn't enough.

I needed to consider her age, how long she had been awake, how recently she had slept or eaten, and—most importantly—what she was actually telling me through her sleepy and hungry cues.

Was she tired or hungry? Was she actually awake, or just moving between sleep cycles? When should I start looking for sleepy cues?

I didn't need another app that simply recorded what had already happened.

I needed something that could help me understand what might be happening now—starting from the newborn stage, when I needed that support most.

That became KoonMiMi.

I built KoonMiMi around a simple belief:

Understandable newborn guidance should not depend on how much outside support a family has.

Not every parent has experienced family nearby, a postpartum caregiver, or access to paid newborn support. A mobile app cannot replace that village—or a healthcare professional—but it can make trustworthy information easier to understand when a tired parent needs it most.

What it does

KoonMiMi is an evidence-informed sleep and feeding companion designed specifically for babies 0–6 months.

Instead of relying on a rigid schedule or a single timer, KoonMiMi considers multiple pieces of context together:

Baby's age + awake time + recent sleep + time since feeding + sleepy and hungry cues

Parents can quickly:

  • Track sleep and feeding with minimal taps
  • Record observable sleepy and hungry cues
  • Receive age-aware sleep and feeding guidance
  • Better understand stirring and transitions between sleep cycles
  • See their baby's developing patterns on a 24-hour rhythm
  • Access practical, evidence-informed information about newborn sleep, feeding, day-night rhythm, and calming

KoonMiMi supports both breastfeeding and bottle feeding and is available in English and Chinese.

Rather than simply showing parents what happened, KoonMiMi is designed to help them make sense of what may be happening now.

The goal isn't to create the perfect newborn schedule or promise that a baby will sleep through the night. It is much simpler:

Track less. Understand your baby more.

Reliable newborn information already exists. But finding it, interpreting it, and applying it while holding a crying baby at 3 a.m. is a very different problem.

KoonMiMi brings that information closer to the moment it is needed. Because the solution is software-based, the same support can potentially reach more families without requiring a proportional increase in one-on-one professional services.

How we built it

KoonMiMi grew from a real caregiving problem into a functioning iOS app.

We combined firsthand parenting experience with epidemiologic training and evidence review to define the app's guidance, reference information, and decision logic.

From the beginning, we designed around one major constraint:

A sleep-deprived parent should be able to use the app with minimal effort.

That meant minimizing unnecessary data entry, creating quick sleep and feeding interactions, surfacing guidance when it becomes relevant, and translating complex information into language that can be understood at a glance.

Rather than calculating guidance solely from wake windows, KoonMiMi combines developmental age and timing information with recent sleep, feeding context, and the cues parents actually observe from their baby.

We also designed for different caregiving experiences by supporting both breastfeeding and bottle feeding and building the app in both English and Chinese.

RevenueCat powers KoonMiMi's Premium in-app purchase and entitlement management, giving us a scalable way to manage Premium access while keeping our development focus on the caregiving experience.

KoonMiMi is now a functioning product published on the Apple App Store and available to real families.

Challenges we ran into

One of our biggest challenges was deciding what KoonMiMi should not do.

Newborn sleep and feeding vary considerably between babies and change rapidly during the first six months. A timer or algorithm cannot know exactly what an individual baby needs.

For that reason, KoonMiMi does not treat wake-window estimates as rigid schedules or present its guidance as a guaranteed prediction. Instead, it considers timing alongside observable baby cues and recent sleep and feeding context.

Another challenge was balancing useful information with cognitive load.

Parents caring for newborns don't need another complicated dashboard. Every additional tap, number, and notification competes for attention.

We repeatedly came back to one question:

Does this help a tired parent understand their baby more easily?

If the answer wasn't clearly yes, we simplified it.

We also had to translate evidence and developmental references into guidance that was useful without crossing the line into diagnosis or replacing professional care. KoonMiMi is designed to complement—not replace—the pediatricians, lactation professionals, and other people families rely on.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud that KoonMiMi moved beyond an idea and became a real, published product that families can use today.

In a short development period, we:

  • Built and launched a functioning iOS application
  • Integrated RevenueCat for Premium purchases and entitlement management
  • Designed guidance specifically for the rapidly changing first six months of life
  • Supported both breastfeeding and bottle-feeding families
  • Created English and Chinese experiences
  • Combined sleep, feeding, developmental context, and parent-observed cues rather than relying on a single timer
  • Built a 24-hour rhythm view that turns individual logs into an understandable picture of the baby's day
  • Made the app publicly available through the Apple App Store

But one of the accomplishments I'm most proud of is much more personal:

I use KoonMiMi every day.

My second daughter is now three months old, and KoonMiMi has become part of how our family navigates her day.

Instead of constantly doing the mental math—How long has she been awake? When did she last eat? Is she starting to look tired?—I can see the relevant context in one place and focus more attention on her cues.

For me, that has taken away a meaningful part of the mental load of newborn care.

By combining timing with her sleepy cues, we've become much better at recognizing when she is ready for sleep. At three months, we are typically able to soothe her to sleep within about 2–5 minutes when we catch the right moment.

This is our family's experience, not a promise that KoonMiMi will make every baby fall asleep in 2–5 minutes. But it showed us that the problem we set out to solve was real: sometimes parents don't need more tracking—they need help turning what they already know about their baby into something they can act on.

We've also shared KoonMiMi with a small group of parents, allowing us to move beyond our own household and begin learning how other families use and interpret the experience.

For an app that began as something I desperately wanted during my own newborn days, seeing it become a tool that I use every day—and can now share with other families—is an accomplishment we're incredibly proud of.

Families shouldn't need to become newborn-sleep experts just to make sense of their baby's day.

KoonMiMi takes information that can feel fragmented and overwhelming and makes it easier to understand at the moment a parent needs it.

What we learned

Building KoonMiMi reinforced something I have learned throughout my work in epidemiology:

Information is only useful when people can understand and act on it.

The challenge wasn't simply collecting more newborn data. Parents already have plenty of numbers—hours slept, minutes awake, time since feeding.

The harder problem was turning those data into meaningful context without creating false precision.

We also learned that designing for exhausted parents changes how you think about product development.

Every extra tap matters. Every unnecessary number competes for attention. Guidance needs to be understandable in seconds, not minutes.

And sometimes the most useful feature isn't another prediction.

It's helping a parent recognize and understand what their baby is already telling them.

What's next for KoonMiMi: Newborn Sleep & Feed

KoonMiMi is live, but this is only the beginning.

Next, we want to improve personalization while preserving appropriate uncertainty, expand our evidence-informed educational content, improve accessibility and localization, and continue refining the experience based on feedback from real families.

We also want to explore how KoonMiMi can make reliable newborn information accessible to more parents across languages, cultures, feeding approaches, and levels of family support.

Our long-term vision extends beyond building another baby tracker.

We want to explore how thoughtfully designed technology can close the gap between reliable maternal and infant health information and the everyday moments when families actually need it—without trying to replace healthcare professionals or the human relationships families depend on.

Because not every new parent has a village nearby.

But every family deserves access to trustworthy, understandable support.

Track less. Understand your baby more.

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