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Supporting Dads-to-Be Through Pregnancy

Inspiration

Becoming a dad is incredibly exciting, but is also very overwhelming. There is a huge amount to learn and you can't help but feel unprepared. So I did as most Dads do and bought all of the books, Googled everything and eventually, searched for a pregnancy app that could help. However most of them are designed primarily for the person who is pregnant.

There is a huge amount to learn, from understanding what is happening during each stage of pregnancy to knowing how best to support your partner and prepare for the baby's arrival.

I wanted to build an app that makes that information approachable and relevant to dads-to-be. Instead of simply showing fetal development, the app focuses on a simple question:

"What should I know, and what can I do to help this week?"

That idea became the foundation of the project.

And these are the results so far in 1 month:

Downloads: 6000+
Active Trials: 239
Active Subscriptions: 753
Revenue: $23,385

What It Does

The app guides expectant fathers through pregnancy week by week.

Rather than overwhelming users with medical information, it presents useful information in a simple and accessible way.

Features of the app:

Understand what's happening with partner & baby - A break down of the babies development and symptoms their partner might be experiencing currently.
Practical ways they can offer support - daily and weekly tasks that give actionable steps you can take to support your partner and prepare for the birth.
Important milestones and things to prepare for - an easy to digest timeline showing your current progress and what's to come in the future.
Insights to feel more prepared - Short bite sized lessons on areas most Dads have questions on, all in one place.
Tools we wish we had - an array of tools we wish we had at our disposal when preparing for the birth. Some of these include a contraction timer, appointment reminder, birth plan and movement log.

The goal is to help expectant fathers feel informed, involved, and prepared throughout the pregnancy.

How We Built It

We wanted to think from the perspective of what we wish we had in an app when we were expectant fathers.

A pregnancy lasts for many months, so I wanted the interface to immediately answer the most relevant questions without requiring users to search through lots of information.

I designed the experience around the current week of pregnancy. From there, users can see relevant updates, advice, milestones, and practical actions.

For the technical implementation, I used:

React Native & Expo — for building the cross platform application
Revenuecat - for subscription management, remote paywalls & A/B testing
Mobbin — for UI & onboarding flow inspiration
Firebase — for analytics & crash reporting

One of my main priorities was keeping the interface simple. Pregnancy information can quickly become complicated, so I tried to turn a large amount of information into small, digestable pieces alongside actioanable tasks.

Challenges We Faced

One of the biggest challenges was deciding what information actually matters to an expectant father.

There is a huge amount of pregnancy information available, but simply putting all of it into an app wouldn't necessarily make the experience useful. We had to think carefully about not just making a reskinned version of a female pregnancy app.

We wanted to keep the app's main functionality as practical as possible and that's why we followed the likes of Finch and used daily and weekly tasks to keep the user feeling rewarded which helped to boost our retention numbers.

Another challenge was seeing users drop off during onboarding when originally we were explaining our apps functionality. We pivoted to follow an onboarding strategy from the likes of Headway and Blinkist which is more of a quiz style onboarding. This drastically reduced the amount of users dropping off during the onboarding as it gives them a sense that the app is being personlised to their needs.

I also had to think about tone. Pregnancy can involve excitement, anxiety, uncertainty, and serious medical situations. I wanted the app to feel friendly and encouraging without trivialising the experience or pretending to replace professional medical advice.

What We Learned

Building this project taught us that good product design isn't just about adding features. It's also about deciding what not to include.

We learned how important it is to ship an MVP fast and by building in public we got feedback straight away from our users on features they liked / disliked.

Furthermore we learned how to harness analytics to track user behaviour in our app and where users were dropping off in our app. This allowed us to focus our efforts on the most used features and improve the parts of our funnel which was the weakest.

On the technical side, switching to use Revenuecat's remote paywall allowed us to quickly deploy changes and fixes to our paywall meaning we no longer had to push out new versions and wait for Apple's review process.

Accomplishments That We're Proud Of

Since launching the app and building in public we have had a tremendous amount of positive feedback from soon to be Dads and Mums alike. So much so that we have been interviewed on the BBC as they really resonated with our story.

After the BBC interview we have had an explosion of interest in the app with some big influencers in the niche reaching out and commenting how much they love the idea. It's extremely reassuring to know that others are also facing the same problems as us and believe what we've spent time building is useful for them too.

The app hasn't just been useful for new Dads either as second time round fathers have reached out to say that the app has been a real help to them, suggesting things that they'd not even considered the first time round.

What's Next

We have a waiting list of over 200+ people for an Android version so that is our top priority currently.

On top of that we have had a large amount of intrest from brands and charities reaching out for partnerships with us. We'd love to feature articles from those charities and possibly explore affliate oppourtunities with brands (P.S we would love if Revenuecat made this super simple for us <3).

We've spent very little on paid ads so far but seen promising returns. This is something that we want to look to scale up in the future along with ways to optimise our funnel conversion using the likes of Revenuecat's A/B tests for paywalls.

Ultimately, we'd like the project to grow from a pregnancy companion into something that helps dads navigate the transition from expectant father to new parent.

Our user base is primarily UK based currently but we believe this could really take off in the likes of US & Canada (👀 A times square billboard could really help with this)