Launch HN: Trustle (YC W20) – On-demand child development experts for parents

Not OP but I've got a 6 month old. I got some good advice from strangers and am compelled to pay it forward.

I highly recommend the book Happiest Baby on the Block, and even more so, the video (still sold as a DVD, but you can also stream online[1]). There are a lot of shorter videos of the author, Harvey Karp doing his thing if you want a taste[2]). The basic idea is that because humans have to be born early due to skull size, babies have a virtual 4th trimester. For the first 3-4 months of life the best way to help them is to simulate the womb environment using the 5 S's: swaddling, sucking reflex, swaying (really more like jiggling), shhing (white noise), side or stomach position (for calming, not for sleeping). The right combination of these will activate a "calming reflex".

Another good starter resource I recommend is the Wonder Weeks book and app. It marks out periods when your baby will be going through a "leap" in cognitive ability, which often are accompanied by fussy behaviour that seems to come out of nowhere. It's very reassuring to understand that your baby, who you think you had figured out, is currently a bit overwhelmed because they are all of a sudden seeing clearly beyond 8 inches or understanding that things are related to other things, and knowing that the fussing is a natural adjustment period to new skills and awareness makes their sudden shifts in behavior interesting rather than distressing.

There are also 3-4 pages of great advice in the book Bringing up Bebe on the French approach to "sleep teaching", which revolves around taking a few minutes to watch a baby who wakes up crying instead of just picking them up right away, thus giving them a chance to fall back asleep naturally, combined with the idea of establishing a window between midnight and 5am when you calm a crying baby down with any method other than feeding. This helps them to establish the idea of nighttime and hopefully means that the parents can get some sleep. 4 hours of uninterrupted sleep is a godsend, especially for a breastfeeding mom.

A couple of books that should appeal to a lot of the HN crowd are Emily Oster's Expecting More and Cribsheet which looks at various aspects of pregnancy and childcare from a research-focused perspective.

Sleep training is really tough, and there are a lot of books out there that repeat the same ideas. I found Sleep Sense to have a pretty clearly laid method for "camping out" or "graduated extinction" aka "Ferberizing", both of which are more gentle than Weissbulth's full cry it out approach. YMMV and there are a lot of strong opinions on this. I'm in the middle of this so I'm less confident to make recommendations.

Feel free to email me.

[1] https://www.justwatch.com/ca/movie/the-happiest-baby-on-the-... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6OtPSfyZXNw

I'd like to elaborate a little bit on what I'm suspicious of. Two relevant ideas are commonly encountered on Hackernews. The first: "Commoditize your compliment." (https://www.gwern.net/Complement) and the second, related, notion of "platforms."

It sounds to me like your startup wants to create a platform which captures the relationship between a family and their child development expert. In this business model your compliments are families and child development experts and by creating a low friction market between them you are naturally inclined to view them as commodities, as the platform holder. In my experience educated professionals don't like to be treated as commodities (in fact, I've never met a person who likes the idea of their labor being commoditized). Furthermore, my sense is that in the particular case of childhood development, a more personal touch is required (is perhaps the actual effective thing) in counseling children and families. In my view, the business model you have here, the fact that you think of it as a startup and that you debuted it on Hackernews, suggests that these fundamentally economic ideas form the substructure of what you are proposing.

The idea of connecting families to expert advice is great. If you really cared about that, why didn't you form a cooperative of child development experts who could invest in the appropriate technology? Such a platform, because it would be under cooperative control by the professionals in question, would resist commodification of both the families and professionals involved. In fact, a cooperative arrangement could even extend ownership to the families involved.

When I see a startup I assume the founders have dollar signs in their eyes. Years of hanging out on Hackernews have only underlined that perception. What I am getting at is that the very structure and context of this idea suggests either an ulterior motive or (to be more charitable to you) a misaligned incentive. I'm suspicious of either.

Sorry, I could just check my comments now. Thanks for the recommendations. I am really against sleep training though :)