Two people.
Preg is not a startup. It is an app built by one person for the person he loves, with input from the person he loves on every screen. We are not founders. We are Nathan and Megan.
Nurse. Husband. Built this in the evenings.
I've been a nurse for a little over ten years. Most of that has been in adult inpatient settings, with the last few in a unit that sees a lot of pregnant patients. I have spent a lot of shifts watching people use their phones during the appointments and procedures that mattered most to them, and I have spent a lot of years quietly believing that the apps they were using were not very good.
I do not have a formal computer science background. I took one programming class in college, sixteen years ago, and forgot most of it. When Megan got pregnant, I started building Preg with the help of AI coding assistants and a stack of tabs. I asked questions. I read documentation. I made plenty of mistakes that took me an embarrassing number of hours to debug. I learned by shipping.
What I do have is a decade of watching what works at the bedside and what doesn't. What people actually read and what they ignore. What language makes someone calmer and what language makes them panic. The app reflects all of that. Every screen has my hands on it. The thing about being a nurse is that you spend your career being useful in small, specific ways. This was the bigger version of that, for the person I love most.
PhD. Wife. First user. Best critic.
Megan has a PhD in a field I cannot pronounce correctly on the first try, and she is very kind about it. She is in her second trimester at the time of writing. She is the first user, the primary feedback source, and the reason this app exists in the form that it does.
She is the one who told me the vegetable-comparisons in This Week were patronizing and asked me to find a different way to say your baby is the size of a banana. She is the one who pointed out that the Daily Brief sounded like an HR email and asked me to write more like myself. She is the one who designed the Cravings map after the third time she tried to remember what she'd wanted three weeks earlier and couldn't.
She also has the patience to tolerate her husband building software at the kitchen table for a year, which I would like to put on the public record. The features that people who download this app will love the most are the ones Megan asked for.
How we work on it.
I do the building. Megan does the using. We do the talking together. Most evenings, she'll tell me about something that was annoying her about the app, and the next evening it'll be different. Some features get scrapped after a week. Some features grow into screens we didn't have a name for. The whole thing is a slow conversation between the two of us, with the app in the middle of it.
For a year, neither of us thought of this as a product — it was a thing we made for ourselves that, possibly, other people could use someday. "Someday" recently got a date range: Preg is heading to the App Store. But Megan keeps reminding me that the most important thing about the app is that it works for her, and that hasn't moved. She is the first user. Everyone else, however many there turn out to be, gets the app that had to pass her review first.