– Growing up. Natalie Gordon started the baby registry Babylist in 2011 to serve customers like her. A former software engineer for Amazon, she was about to have her first child and started building a registry that met her needs. That helped Babylist distinguish itself as a destination for new parents of the early 2010s in a market where any registry for them was baby blue and pale pink, with cutesy cartoons they didn’t want to send around to friends and family. “I was our core user,” she remembers. “I was writing every single line of code. It was very easy to know what to build because I was building it for myself.”
Fourteen years later, with a 14-year-old at home, Gordon is no longer the core customer for the platform. It’s now a registry, an ecommerce destination for new parents, and an affiliate sales powerhouse—a profitable one that brings in more than $500 million in annual revenue, Fortune is the first to report. Gordon tells new hires at Babylist who don’t have kids that they’re closer to their core user—brand-new parents—than she is.
