TuneLoom

Choose a developmental goal for your little one
Discover the science of why the songs for each goal are effective
Interactive and fun user journey for parents to create songs
Main page will have some songs ready for you minutes after signup
Screen-free music you can trust, giving parents guilt-free moments to relax

Inspiration

TuneLoom

I was on my way to a friend's baby shower, stuck in a long layover in Minneapolis, when boredom-ridden doom scrolling took me to a tweet that said:

"836k parents search for baby music monthly and Spotify for babies can be a 20M/Yr business"

I thought it was a funny coincidence that I read this on my way to a baby shower, so I searched for the domain babymusic.ai which, surprisingly, was available! I purchased it immediately, thinking about what I could build in the future.

Call it serendipity or thank the algorithm gods, but right before boarding my flight, I saw another tweet about a UC San Diego research paper claiming kids can develop perfect pitch if they are exposed to sufficiently complex music before the age of 5.

That what it!! 3 crazy coincidences were enough to inspire me to build something!

My Brain Started to Put Together 2+2

Clear demand for baby music with 800K+ monthly Google searches
Existing solutions like Cocomelon are terrible for kids
Tons of research on the positive impact of music on child development
Deep personalization of lyrics can create a highly emotional parenting experience

I knew that if I could build something that helps babies with mood, sleep, and cognition while giving parents the joy of personalized music, tired parents will pay anything for peace.

And that’s how TuneLoom was born.
(Why TuneLoom and not babymusic.ai? That’s a story for another time — send me a message on LinkedIn or X and I’ll share more!)

What it does

TuneLoom is a one-of-a-kind ios app that creates deeply personalized music for your baby.
Every lyric is custom-crafted with your child’s name, favorite toys, bedtime stories, and special moments.

It’s like having your own songwriter and singer, composing a brand-new song about your baby in real time — turning each track into a one-in-a-million keepsake.

Built on Science

Every melody is designed using neuroscience-backed principles to support your baby’s cognitive, emotional, and sensory development. Few examples of the studies I used are from Harvard, University of Washington, NCBI (and many more)

Parents can choose developmental themes such as:

Sleep & Calm: Gentle melodies that soothe and regulate sleep cycles
Language & Communication: Rhythms that strengthen speech and auditory processing
Focus & Memory: Music patterns that train working memory and attention span
Motor Skills & Movement: Beats that improve coordination and body awareness
Emotional Regulation: Sounds that help babies feel safe, grounded, and joyful

Personalization That Matters

With the personalization engine, you guide the app:
Add Grandma’s name, your baby’s teddy bear, their favorite park or anything else.

How I Built It

TuneLoom is a native ios app that started as a web app using React + TypeScript with a Supabase backend, and was soon upgraded to ios.

Engineered a custom real-time handler for seamless UI updates during async workflows
Added atomic database operations to prevent race conditions
Integrated AI APIs for personalized music and lyric generation, with keys secured server-side via Edge Functions

Security & Moderation

Client-side profanity filtering with the Obscenity library
Server-side content moderation using Google Perspective API for toxicity, insult, harrasment, sexual content detection
Database-level security triggers to block manipulation of premium features

Frontend & Design

Zustand for state management and Tailwind for mobile-first design

Deployment

Hosted on Netlify with automated CI/CD, real-time webhooks, and serverless functions

Payments

In-app purchases in ios via RevenueCat

Journey to Native App
I discovered three critical behaviors of my customers - the parents:

Parents are so busy that they need a bit of nudge to use TuneLoom
Personalized music made in real time is a new concept. So, I needed to teach them.
They wanted the app to be quickly accessible.

Duolingo does all this very well with their native app using gamification and entertaining push notifications. So I made a pivot to native ios mobile app using Capacitor to bring the app to iOS.

Challenges I ran into

1 - Sorting through tons of research to find actionable information

Research papers and scientific journals have all sorts of different information but finding controlled studies where the outcomes showed non-trivial results and actionable insights that i could use for TuneLoom was very challenging and time consuming.

2 - Optimizing Song Quality

It took massive experimentation to finally get high quality song outputs. I had to optimize 4 variables - lyrics generation model, lyrics prompt, music generation model, music prompt, for 6 different developmental goals to offer. That's 6 x 4 = 24 different things to optimize!

3 - Content Moderation and Output Safety

When I circulated the first iteration of my app, some users tried to use creative ways to fool my app into generating unsafe lyrics. While my basic MVP still managed to output safe lyrics, I took that as an opportunity to really strengthen my content moderation. I added 3 layers of safety - client side obscenity filter, server side toxicity, insult, harassment check (Google Perspective API), and finally logging and auditing.

I wrote a technical deep dive on it here.

Accomplishments that I am proud of

Incredibly proud of just working solo and building this from scratch - especially because it works on native ios, desktop web and mobile. Very happy with the song quality.
User-experience was critical for me. It started as a simple song-making utility but I spent a lot of time to upgrade it into an app that makes parents feel like creative partners in their child's development and take them through a journey. The app focuses on eliciting hope as (the goal), calm (the process), and delight (the reward). My secret? Progressive Disclosure!
My first Minimum Lovable Product recevied a very sweet review from a new parent, and it happend at the time when I was very nervous. The feeling that a stranger on a random facebook group appreciated what you built will stay with me.

TuneLoom First User Review

What's next for TuneLoom

Launch it on product hunt
Add duolingo style streak and notifications for user stickiness
Allow parents to record voice-samples so the songs we generate are in their own voice.