Why I Built Daria's Sleep

Okay, I'll just say it: I'm the guy who tracks everything. Workouts, steps, my own sleep patterns, how long my coffee takes to brew depending on the grind size. If a number can be captured, there's a decent chance I've got a note or a chart of it somewhere on my phone. My wife thinks it's a little much. She's probably right, but I've never let that stop me.

So when our daughter was born and sleep instantly became the topic in our house (the thing we worried about, argued about, googled at 1am), I did exactly what you'd expect. I started tracking it. Nap start, nap end, every night wake up, what time she finally settled down. I bounced between three or four different baby tracking apps trying to find one that actually helped, and here's what got under my skin: half of them wanted me to pay just to see basic patterns in data I was the one typing in every single day. I'm the one logging her naps at 6am with one eye open. Charge me for cloud backup, sure, whatever. Charge me to see what time she usually wakes up? Come on.

The moment it clicked

What actually changed things for us wasn't the tracking itself. It was finally seeing the pattern. About six weeks in, I lined up her nap lengths against what time she'd woken up that morning, and there it was, plain as day: wake her up too early and the first nap fell apart every time. Wake her up inside a certain window and it held together almost every time. Nobody had told us this. We'd just been guessing, exhausted, one coin flip of a day after another, until the data finally said the quiet part out loud.

That's basically the whole reason Daria's Sleep exists. Not because tracking sleep is fun (it genuinely isn't, especially at 3am), but because the data was already trying to tell us something useful and none of the apps I'd tried made that easy, or free.

Why sleep, specifically

I could've built a tracker for anything, and honestly I eventually did add feeding, diapers, growth, all of it, because a full day doesn't happen in isolation. But sleep is the thing everything else in a household runs on top of. A well rested baby feeds better, plays better, is just plain easier to be around, and a well rested parent is a way better parent, which is a little ironic since I personally lost a bunch of sleep building an app about sleep. It's genuinely one of the highest leverage things in early childhood, and also one of the things families get the least real help with. Most advice out there is either way too generic ("babies this age need X hours") or way too expensive (a $400 one on one sleep consultant). I wanted something in between: your own kid's actual data, turned into something you can use, without a subscription that costs more than daycare.

What I'm actually trying to build

Not a miracle app that fixes sleep overnight. Nothing does that, and anyone promising it is selling something. What I'm trying to build is the tool I wish I'd had after all those months of app hopping: something that tracks the boring stuff reliably enough that you stop holding it all in your head, and is upfront with you about what the data does and doesn't show. Free logging that's actually free, not a seven day trial in disguise. Pattern insights when you're ready to go looking for them, not a paywall standing in front of information you already own about your own kid.

If you're deep in it right now, the guessing, the midnight googling, the "is this even normal" spiral, I built this for you. I was you not that long ago, minus the part where I now have opinions about wake windows I never asked for. A little bit of pattern where there used to be just noise made a real difference for our family. I hope it does for yours too.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have a chart to check.

Daniel