How Natalie Gordon built BabyList into a $500M baby registry business

Executive overview

Baby registries were broken: single-store, ugly, and overwhelming for first-time parents who didn't know what they needed. Natalie Gordon, a software engineer and new mom in Vancouver, built the alternative she wanted — a universal registry that worked across any retailer and included non-product gifts like services.

She coded BabyList during her son's nap times in 2011, launched it two weeks before he was born, and grew it to over half a billion dollars in annual sales without raising outside money until 2013.

Building something you genuinely need, with the skills to build it yourself, is a rare and powerful combination.

From idea to launch

• Walked into Babies R Us with a scan gun, felt overwhelmed, walked out in tears without adding a single item
• Wanted a registry that worked across any retailer, looked modern, and could include services (dog walking, cloth diaper subscriptions)
• Read The Lean Startup and explicitly used it as a blueprint — saw every mistake she'd made in her failed first startup, Lenguajero
• Spent one month building the MVP; brought on a design student in the Philippines for the UI
• Forced herself to cold-email 10 parenting bloggers before launch, personalising each pitch with products from their own sites
• Posted to Hacker News: "I'm a pregnant hacker, please review my side project" — launched February 2011
• No retailer relationships needed: BabyList linked out to wherever the product was sold; affiliate fees were the revenue model

Early growth on 45 minutes a day

• Max (her son) was a Velcro baby; structured her startup work around nap times, targeting 45 minutes a day
• In BabyList's second month: $140 revenue — compared to Lenguajero's best-ever $40, this felt like clear traction
• Fixed bugs, answered support emails, and emailed bloggers — all within those 45-minute windows
• One blogger's review ranked for "best baby registry" in Google search and drove steady organic traffic for years
• Grew slowly viral: registrants' guests would attend baby showers, some would get pregnant themselves, then use BabyList
• By the one-year mark (February 2012): $3,000/month — the pre-agreed threshold to go full-time

Joining an accelerator and first hires

• Applied to 500 Startups (Mountain View); received $50,000 for equity
• Was the only solo founder in her cohort — felt structurally disadvantaged against teams of three to five
• First contractor she wanted to hire full-time turned down the offer over equity; Natalie cried in a stairwell, then spent a week doing only customer support to reground herself
• Raised a $600,000 seed round off a demo day pitch; key slide: "pregnant women need a lot of stuff"
• Hired about five people; all still did customer support regardless of role
• Got an executive coach after struggling with management; coach's 360 feedback identified specific gaps; Natalie credits structured coaching with transitioning her from founder to effective CEO

Finding the growth engine

• 2011–2014: growth was slow and steady, driven by word-of-mouth and SEO
• 2015: Pinterest opened its platform to advertisers — BabyList was already growing organically there with exactly the right demographic
• First day running Pinterest promoted pins: immediate sign-ups, hockey-stick inflection
• That same year had her second child — by then had a team capable of running operations while she took maternity leave
• 2016: hired first content intern; surveyed users for their most-loved products; published buying guides (best stroller, best car seat, best bottles) — ranked quickly in Google for high-intent searches

Choosing focus over expansion

• Obvious move circa 2016 was to extend the registry model to weddings
• Researched it seriously, then rejected it: the more valuable asset was trust with expecting and new parents
• Committed entirely to the parent vertical — this framing then unlocked every subsequent expansion

The shift to e-commerce

• Revenue was nearly all affiliate fees from a handful of large retailers — felt existentially risky for payroll
• Initial test: bought baby products from Buy Buy Baby, drove them back to the office in her car, listed them as "buy from BabyList"
• Future CFO Jocelyn, hired shortly after, opened her job interview presentation with a 40-point list of reasons e-commerce was a terrible idea (sales tax by state, returns, discontinued inventory)
• Early suppliers refused to sell to a company without a physical store — Natalie cold-called CEOs to get them to take a chance
• First warehouse was the office itself, with bassinets stacked to the ceiling between desks
• Took years to pay off; eventually became the core revenue model
• BabyList still shows competing retailer prices alongside its own — users value the transparency

COVID and the Series B

• March 2020: numbers plummeted immediately; implemented a hiring freeze
• Natalie, nine years in and the world's foremost expert on baby showers, genuinely didn't know if the business would survive without in-person events
• Within weeks, the opposite happened: online gift-buying surged, people were more generous, and BabyList grew beyond projections
• 2021: raised $40M from Norwest Venture Partners; pitched entirely over Zoom
• Opening slide of the deck was revenue — $250M — not GMV; investors kept asking to get their partners on the call
• Norwest was chosen specifically because expectations for growth were aligned, not overpromised

What BabyList is becoming

• Expanding into health: BabyList Health helps parents get breast pumps covered by insurance or Medicaid
• Vision is to be a health platform for the entire new-parent journey, not just a registry
• 2019 was the first year Natalie genuinely believed BabyList could be a billion-dollar business
• Nearly 100 million gifts given through the site; annual revenue estimated at over $500M