Babylist: Natalie Gordon. How a new mom used nap time to build a $500M business.

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Nov 3, 2025

Natalie Gordon, founder and CEO of BabyList, shares her journey from software engineer to building a $500M parenting platform. She cleverly designed a universal baby registry to simplify the overwhelming shopping experience. Balancing motherhood, she created an MVP during nap times, leveraged early affiliate marketing, and pivoted to e-commerce. Natalie also highlights the challenges of hiring, learning to manage as a CEO, and how BabyList expanded into health services for new families. This conversation is a relatable masterclass in entrepreneurial grit and innovation.

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ANECDOTE

The Babies R Us Meltdown That Sparked BabyList

Natalie walked into Babies "R" Us, felt overwhelmed, and left in tears without adding a single item to a registry.
That meltdown became the direct inspiration for building BabyList as a modern, universal registry.

ADVICE

Leverage Bloggers For Early Distribution

Reach out directly to niche bloggers and craft registries that match their voice to win editorial coverage.
Use targeted outreach to demonstrate product fit and secure initial distribution channels.

INSIGHT

Small Signals Indicate Product-Market Fit

Small, consistent product improvements and direct user support can turn tiny revenue into clear signal of product-market fit.
Early traction from a few registries made growth opportunities obvious to Natalie.

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In 2010, software engineer Natalie Gordon was pregnant– and fed up with the overwhelming baby aisles in big box stores. So she quit her computer job to code the registry she wished existed. No pink-and-blue giraffes. No allegiance to a single store. Just a universal list that let friends give the real help that new parents need—from strollers to diaper services to dog-walking.

Natalie coded the first lines of Babylist during her son’s nap time. She managed customer support, pitched bloggers from coffee shops, and learned growth the hard way—first through affiliates, then with a pivotal Pinterest bet, and finally by taking on her own inventory (and all the headaches that come with it). Along the way she wrestled with hiring, firing, fundraising, and the identity shift from founder to CEO. Today, Babylist is one of the most trusted parenting platforms in the U.S., with a retail arm, editorial content, and a program for providing breast pumps.

This is a masterclass in living a problem–and building a solution.

You’ll learn:

How to spot a customer pain point and design an MVP around it
The power of slow virality
How to use a small seed round without losing control
The painful path from affiliate revenue to first-party e-commerce
Stumbles with hiring – and firing– as a first-time CEO
How paid growth works on visual platforms like Pinterest
How “controlling your destiny” justifies a hard shift in business model
How coaching and feedback helps you evolve from founder to leader

Timestamps:

05:32 - Learning to solve hard problems at Amazon -
08:28 - Sabbatical in Latin America: Natalie’s first (failed) business and what it taught her
17:50 - A meltdown in a superstore → the Babylist “aha” moment
19:40 - Designing a universal registry, dog-walking included
24:42 - Blitzing the mommy blogs, a “pregnant hacker” post on Hacker News
30:01 - Why $140/month revenue felt like a victory
39:18 - Going solo at an Accelerator, and the agony of early hiring and firing
49:29 - From “slowly viral” to real scale, and how Pinterest helped
58:09 - Affiliate links to in-house inventory → piles of bassinets in the office
1:01:57 - COVID’s unexpected windfall, the health wedge (breast pumps & beyond)

This episode was produced by Kerry Thompson with music by Ramtin Arablouei. It was edited by Neva Grant. Our audio engineers were Patrick Murray and Jimmy Keeley.

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