There’s a particular kind of exhaustion that comes with a newborn and a toddler under the same roof. Jess Burton knows it well. She was on maternity leave with her second child, trying to hold a schedule together for two very different small people, when she realised the parenting apps she’d relied on the first time around weren’t actually helping.
“They had too much weight and engagement required”, she says of the trackers she’d used with her first baby, logging every feed, every nap, every detail. “It made me feel guiltier for not getting all the logging right, like another thing I was falling behind on”. What she wanted was simpler: a scheduler that followed the science of wake windows by age, because she’d already seen how much of a difference the right rhythm made to how happily a day unfolded.
That idea became Routini Baby, now live on the app store, a scheduling app built for parents who want the benefits of routine without the burden of constant logging.
From side project to something real
Routini Baby started as a way to scratch a personal itch rather than a grand business plan. Jess had learned the wake window theory with her first child and knew the underlying science was solid, but that it wasn’t easy to apply in the moment, especially for a sleep-deprived parent, let alone one managing more than one child. So when her second baby arrived, she set out to solve her own problem: an app that handled the calculations for her.
For a long time, it stayed a loose, low-stakes project. She joked with her husband about the tagline “ready to routini?”, but somewhere along the way, it stopped being a joke. “I guess it just suddenly got more serious and I got hooked on seeing how far I could take it”, she says. “I’m still pretty blown away it’s a real app on the app store”.
Built on real life, not theory
What sets Routini Baby apart is that it wasn’t designed in the abstract. Jess used her own daughter as the test case, refining the app’s logic as her baby moved through each age and stage. Getting the day-to-day flow to feel natural took far more nuance than she expected. There were more variables and edge cases in a baby’s day than any spreadsheet could easily capture and it took genuine trial and error, grounded in the realities of actual family life, to get it right.
The road to launch took the better part of nine months, mostly built in the margins of an already full life: early mornings before the house woke up, or evenings once the kids were finally down. Getting the app approved and live on the app store turned out to be one of the biggest hurdles of all. “There were a lot of compliance hoops for a novice”, she says, and the process was a crash course in an entirely new world, on top of the marketing and business side she also had to learn from scratch.
There was a personal hurdle too. Launching meant putting her own name on a public app store listing, without the shield of a company behind it. “It was a little nerve wracking, a bit like publishing a novel without using an alias”, she says.
Why it matters
Underneath the logistics, Routini Baby is really about something simple: giving parents back a bit of headspace. Jess still uses it daily, sending the day’s routine to her husband or a carer before she heads out the door. It’s the tool she wished existed the first time around, built for parents who want their baby’s day to run more smoothly, without having to become data analysts to make it happen.
Asked what’s next, she doesn’t talk about growth targets or funding rounds. She talks about connection. “I’d love to see it resonate with the community and get some external validation that this was really a product that hit the mark for mums other than just myself”, she says. She sees routine as something bigger than baby schedules too – a thread that runs through all of family life. As the saying goes, routine sets you free.
Routini Baby is available now on the app store. You can find Jess and the app at routinibaby.com, on Instagram, and on Facebook.
