I was sitting in the dark next to a sleeping baby, exhausted beyond reason, typing one-handed into Apple Notes: "she smiled today, like properly smiled at me. 3:47am. Her eyes went crinkly at the sides."
Three weeks later I couldn't remember which night. Six months later I wasn't sure of the month. A year later I found the note by accident while scrolling for a grocery list, and it hit me much harder than I expected.
"She smiled today, like properly smiled at me. 3:47am. Her eyes went crinkly at the sides."
I'm Kyle. I'm a developer, and at the time I was a new parent trying to solve a problem with the wrong tools.
Every solution made a different mess
I tried everything. Apple Notes for the moments I wanted to write down. The camera roll for photos — 4,000 of them, in reverse order, mixed with screenshots of parking receipts and work Slack threads. A shared family album for grandparents that nobody updated consistently. Tinybeans, which was fine until I realised I was putting my daughter's photos on someone else's server for an ad-supported business model I didn't fully understand. Qeepsake, which texted me prompts and felt clever until I had 200 answers with no way to find anything. A WhatsApp group that started well and now has 800 messages and one photo of a cake.
The photos were there. The voice notes were there. The observations were there. They just didn't add up to anything. They were scattered across five apps, chronologically mixed with everything else in my life, and completely disconnected from the milestones that gave them meaning.
And I kept noticing that the most important moments — the ones worth telling her about when she's 18 — were the ones that almost didn't get captured at all. The half-asleep observations. The one-liner on the way home. The twenty-second voice note because there wasn't time to type.
The first version was just for me
I built a simple app for myself. A place for all of it — photos, voice notes, typed observations, milestones — organised by her age and development, on my phone, mine forever. Not synced to a server unless I chose to share something. No algorithm deciding what I saw. No subscription to unlock my own photos.
I called it Piplet, after the little pip — the seed of something.
Why local-first?
The decision to keep everything on-device wasn't a privacy-first marketing stance. It was a parent-first decision. I don't want a subscription model where my daughter's first word is locked behind a paywall. I don't want an algorithm deciding which memories I see. I don't want photos of my child training someone's AI model. I wanted an app that worked like a book: once it's yours, it's yours.
Then I showed it to other parents.
The reaction was the same every time. Not "that's nice" — but "wait, when can I actually use this?" Parents who had an 8-year-old and a 3-year-old and had been meaning to print a book for two years. Parents who had moved from Tinybeans after the third privacy policy update and hadn't found anything that felt right. Parents who had years of memories in Apple Notes and no idea how to do anything with them.
That's when it became a product.
What we're building
Piplet is still in development. We're a small team building carefully — the kind of app that covers the whole of childhood, from the first photo in the delivery room to the 18th Birthday Vault, has to get the foundation right. We won't rush it.
The things that matter most to us:
Privacy by design, not by policy. Your memories live on your phone. We don't have a database of your family's life. If we went away tomorrow, your app would keep working and your data would still be yours.
The whole childhood, not just the baby years. Most memory apps stop being useful around age three. Piplet covers six phases of childhood — from infant milestones to teenager season stats — because the memories that matter don't stop coming just because they stop being cute.
Print that actually happens. Most parents mean to print a book. Most parents never do, because it's too much work. Piplet does the layout for you, polishes the captions if you want, and makes ordering as simple as we can make it.
A business model you can trust. We earn when you print a book. That's it. No ads, no selling your data, no subscription to see what you've already captured. The alignment is the point.