Cocoo started with my own experience — as a machine learning engineer, data scientist, and a very tired mom.
2:13 AM, April 5, 2023
I was holding my phone in one hand, googling — and holding my crying daughter in the other. I was a machine learning engineer and data scientist who solved complex problems for a living. But I couldn't figure out why my own baby woke up crying every night from 12–3 AM.
I searched “baby sleep schedule for 4 months old.” Every source said something different. Who could I trust?
- Sleep consultants: $300–$1,000, no guaranteed results
- Cry-it-out: felt too aggressive — and risky to do wrong
I treated it like a data problem
I decided to treat my baby's sleep like a dataset. I logged every sleep and feed. Analyzed patterns in Excel. Studied AAP sleep standards. Read a book (~$30) and took an online course (~$250) for two weeks.
That's when I finally understood why she was waking:
- Too much daytime sleep vs age norms
- Not enough milk before night sleep
I built a personalized, realistic schedule for our family. After 6 weeks and 3 adjustments, our nights finally became calm.
The cost of figuring it out alone
My daughter has been a great sleeper ever since. But I hadn't slept well for so long that I developed insomnia and depression myself. It took two more years and significant cost to recover.
That's when I asked myself:
What if a tool had done this for me — without the suffering, guesswork, or delay?
That question became Cocoo.
Why I write about baby sleep
I'm not a pediatrician or a certified sleep consultant. I'm a machine learning engineer who lived the problem, solved it with data, and now has access to something most sleep experts don't: real, tracked sleep data from thousands of babies.
Most baby sleep advice is based on small clinical studies (n=30–50) or expert opinion. Cocoo's data comes from parents logging real nights — thousands of data points across hundreds of babies at every age. When I write about what happens at 4 months or why babies wake at 4am, I'm not summarizing a textbook. I'm looking at what actually shows up in the data.
Every blog post I publish cites peer-reviewed research and Cocoo's own aggregate data. I believe parents deserve both: the established science and the real-world patterns that science hasn't caught up to yet.
What I believe about baby sleep
- Every baby's sleep patterns are individual. Charts are starting points, not answers.
- Parents don't need more advice. They need their own baby's data, interpreted clearly.
- Good sleep doesn't require cry-it-out. It requires understanding why your baby isn't sleeping.
- A $300 sleep consultant and a well-built app are solving the same problem: reading your baby's patterns. The app just uses more data.
- If you can't explain the root cause, you can't fix the sleep.
A note on transparency
I built and run Cocoo. When I mention Cocoo in blog posts, that's not a neutral recommendation — it's my product. I want to be upfront about that.
All data cited as “Cocoo aggregate data” comes from anonymized, aggregated sleep logs. No individual baby's data is ever shared. Sample sizes and methodology are noted in every post that references our data.