Babylist · 2026
Vision: create the best product in the world for managing a baby shower.
1
The Opportunity
I'm a big believer in productizing behavior people are already doing. LTV extension and TAM expansion don't require reaching for completely different users or use cases.
Usually there's an invitation already in front of you: look at what users must leave your product to accomplish elsewhere. As long as that job-to-be-done is thematically related, people would rather use one product.
Users had to find solutions outside of Babylist to create, share, and manage their baby shower.
2
The Strategy
Getting the guest list into the system meant we could build a relationship with each Guest before they became a Gift Giver. Knowing who was invited and whether they were coming let us better predict, and drive, purchases from that registry.
Events was extensible to any wishlist, allowing users to create events for birthdays and holiday parties.
3
The Challenge: A New User Model
The user model only had two roles: Registrants and Gift Givers. (Technically we also had Partners and Collaborators, but they were variations of Registrants.)
That user model was fine when the registry was the only substrate produced by using Babylist. Meaning, the registry was a surface populated by one side and purchased by the other side. Registrants added items and Gift Givers bought them.
But Events introduced a completely new plane of transaction and thus needed new roles: Event Hosts and Event Guests. What's more, a Host could also be a Registrant and/or a Gift Giver — or neither! Many shower hosts are friends or relatives of the expecting parent.
This opens the gate to true TAM expansion: creating a logged-in experience intended for users who are there to manage an event, not to add or buy items from a registry.
4
Outcome
5
Bonus
This was our first step into transactional text messaging. We had marketing SMS, but no transactional SMS yet, and this feature became the forcing function to set it up.
In the MVP version, users sent out a link to their event themselves. In the second milestone, users could enter a guest list into Babylist, and Babylist would send out those invitations in bulk on the host's behalf.