Why I built Nestli

I'm a data engineer. I spend my working life making sure information gets from one place to another cleanly, and that the people who need it can actually find it.

Then we brought Abigail home, and I could not tell you when she last ate.

That's not an exaggeration. Somewhere around day three, my wife asked me how much Abigail had taken at the last bottle, and I stood in the kitchen with a burp cloth on my shoulder and genuinely did not know. Two ounces? Three? Was that the feed at 1am, or the one before it? We'd both been up. We'd both fed her. Neither of us had any idea what the other one had done.

We tried the obvious things first. A notepad on the counter — which worked until one of us fed her upstairs. A shared note on our phones — which turned into an unreadable wall of timestamps and typos. I texted my wife “4oz 2:40” more times than I want to admit, at hours when neither of us should have been holding a phone.

Then at the two-week appointment, the pediatrician asked how she'd been eating. And we did the thing every new parent does: we looked at each other and guessed.

What actually goes wrong at 3am

Here's what I learned building this, and what most tracking apps seem to have forgotten.

At 3am you are holding a baby in one arm. You have one thumb. The room is dark and you don't want to wake anyone with a bright screen. You have maybe four seconds of attention before something else needs it.

Any app that makes you tap through a menu, pick a category, scroll a time picker, and confirm has already lost. You won't do it. You'll tell yourself you'll log it in the morning, and you won't, and by day five you've stopped entirely.

So the first rule I gave myself was that a bottle should be two taps. Not two screens — two taps. Amount, done. The timestamp is now, because it's always now. If you need to backdate something you can, but you shouldn't have to think about it in the common case.

The second rule was that nothing should ever be lost because you got interrupted. A nursing timer that dies when your phone locks or the page refreshes is worse than no timer at all, because now you're annoyed and you don't have the data.

The part that actually mattered: both of us

The feeding log turned out to be the easy half.

The real problem in our house wasn't tracking — it was the handoff. My wife would take a shift, I'd take the next one, and every transition involved the same groggy debrief. When did she last eat? How much? Did you change her? Did you already give her the vitamin drops?

Most trackers treat this as an afterthought. One parent owns the app on their phone, and the other one asks. Some of them charge you to share, which is a strange thing to charge for when the entire problem is that two exhausted people need the same information.

In Nestli, both of you write to the same live record. Not a synced copy, not an export, not a screenshot you send in the morning. When my wife logs the 2am bottle, it's just there when I wake up. I don't have to ask, and she doesn't have to remember to tell me.

That changed the feel of the newborn stretch more than any chart did. The person who didn't do the feed still knows about the feed. Nobody is the keeper of the information.

What I wanted to see, and what I didn't

I made a deliberate choice not to build a product that tells you what your baby's numbers mean. I'm a dad who writes software, not a pediatrician, and there is already plenty on the internet willing to make a new parent anxious about a perfectly normal day.

What Nestli shows you is what happened. Today's totals. An hour-by-hour view. A week of daily bars so you can see the shape of things. That's it — and it turns out that's what you actually want, both for your own peace of mind and for the moment the pediatrician asks and you can just read the number off the screen.

Where it is now

It runs in a browser. No app store, no install, nothing for your partner to download at 3am when they just want to see the log. You send them a link and they're in.

It's free to use, and it's the app my wife and I are using tonight for Abigail. When something about it annoys us at 4am, I fix it that weekend.

If you're in the fog right now: it gets better, and in the meantime you don't have to remember everything.