Built in a hospital waiting room,
while we waited for our son.

“You know what would be amazing right now? A Domino’s pizza tracker, but for the baby.”

A friend said this the morning of Rachel’s induction, half-joking, while we were packing the hospital bag. We laughed. Then we got to the hospital and waited.

For context, I am a bad texter. Not “sometimes takes a few hours” bad. I mean I have, more than once, taken weeks to text back and then acted like that was a normal way to participate in society. Going into the day, I was already worried I would disappoint Rachel’s family by disappearing for long stretches. The pizza tracker joke was funny, but it was also practical. Instead of texting everyone individually, we could give them one place to check.

So we whipped out a laptop and built it.

By hour three, we had a cobbled-together prototype on a real domain. It barely functioned, but it had phases, a dilation ring, a guestbook, and a name-guessing leaderboard, which was apparently enough. We sent the link to family and friends, and the texts stopped almost immediately.

Around the same time, we met another couple in the waiting area. First baby, induction, same long day ahead. We told them what we were building, and they wanted one too. So we deployed them an instance, then spent the next hour talking through what they actually wanted to share with their family. Some of their ideas are still in the product. Their texts stopped too.

Adrian arrived on his own schedule, slightly earlier than the leaderboard predicted. Forty-seven people watched the dot pulse on his page. No one guessed his name, which honestly feels correct. The guestbook filled with messages from people who matter, including a few we had not heard from in years.

Two things became obvious pretty quickly. First, not having to text everyone during labor was one of the best decisions we made that day. We came out looking surprisingly competent, and I personally cleared a very low bar by a comfortable margin.

Second, the page became more than a status update. It became a keepsake: a timestamped record of every phase, every guess, and every “sending love.” We’ll show it to Adrian someday.

Once we got home, and Adrian started sleeping in eleven-minute increments, we put Stork Drop online for everyone. It is the same basic page we built for ourselves. The same one that worked for the couple down the hall.