How big is the baby?

Finally it's out there in the world.

I started working on https://howbigisthebaby.io over the summer, just so my wife and I could savor the growth of the baby on a daily basis.

So excited to finally put it on Product Hunt, and open it up to other expecting parents.

Just redid the landing page for the website, and added the pricing for it. Going to experiment with two models - Individual and Couple.

The individual plan is meant for one user (typically one parent) - the daily baby size text update is sent to one phone number.

The couple plan is targeted mostly at both the parents. So the daily baby size text update will be sent to two phone numbers.

Also, adding the Gumroad page with two versions of the pricing model. So, the website will link to Gumroad for the payment execution.

https://howbigisthebaby.io

Got some feedback from one of the early preview users that it would be nice to include the current week and day of the pregnancy in the text message (I think the medical term for it is Gestational Age).

I thought it made a lot of sense. So, over the weekend, I added that. Here's what the text message now looks like .

Updated the code base for howbigisthebaby.io to include a different greeting in the daily text message.

Instead of saying "Hello Amit" everyday, it will now choose a random greeting from a wide variety of hello greetings using greetingsapi.com, which is another side-project I launched recently.

It uses this endpoint -

https://www.greetingsapi.com/random/hello

Finally, built an Alexa skill for howbigisthebaby.io on a live stream. Pretty happy with what I was able to do in about 90 minutes.

Uses the same Airtable database as the SMS version.

For now, the Alexa users are kept separate from the SMS users. Connecting them would just add a bit of friction in getting the Alexa users started.

So, for now, all is asks you is your due date, and then queries the howbigisthebaby.io database to get you the appropriate update, along with the picture.

I wasn't liking the standard "hello" greeting in the daily text messages from howbigisthebaby.io. So, did a quick bit of search, and found a few "hello" greetings in a variety of languages, like French, Hindi, Tibetan, and more.

Added them all to the Greetings base in Airtable. Variety is the spice of life. Also, it's fun to learn how to say "hello" in different languages. I like it.

This just makes me so happy. Finally sent out invites to handful of people who had signed up to be on the waitlist. I wish there were more people on the waitlist, but I'll take this for now while I work out the kinks in the system.

Want to make sure everyone is receiving their text messages on time, along with the pictures which are getting powered by Unsplash.

As a former Amazon Alexa evangelist, it was probably a matter of time before the thought occured - what if I could ask Alexa how big is the baby each morning? I love the text messages, but asking Alexa would be cool too.

But instead of building this offline in isolation, I figured I should do a live stream of this - building an Alexa skill from scratch for howbigisthebaby.io

So, I created a Luma page, and tweeted it out. Hopefully this will be interesting to a few people. Regardless, I will hopefully have a working Alexa voice skill at the end of it.

Alright, so I now have the landing page for howbigisthebaby.io up and running. It's nothing fancy, but hopefully it will do the job.

The goal for now is to open up the waitlist, while I work on the backend to make it self-serve.

For now, I am using Airtable forms as the mechanism to collect the details from the interested users - name, email, phone, and baby due date.

My wife and I have been using the SMS app for a few months, and we love it.

I would love for other pregnant parents to use this, and hopefully enjoy it as much as both of us have. So, I will be turning this into a self-serve app that anyone can sign up for.

✅ Buy the domain - Done!