By Jennifer Wong (Founder & CEO, Alt12 Apps) I was five months pregnant when I decided to launch my startup Alt12 Apps in late 2009.

At the time, I was working at Gracenote, a music technology company, leading their marketing efforts. Sony had acquired Gracenote a year earlier, and while I had spent the last five years helping the company grow, at that point we were clearly in post-acquisition transition. The fast paced, wear-many-hats days gave way to steering committees, knowledge-based projects, and the usual awkwardness of corporate growth and process. I was getting bored, and worse yet, uninspired. So I began to think about what was next.

Pregnancy and Starting Up: Expecting and the Unexpected

To be honest, launching a startup was a bit unexpected, but my pregnancy had brought new life in me, literally and figuratively. It inspired my first product.

I was a typical busy working mom-to-be and self-proclaimed tech geek who lived by her smartphone. When I found out I was pregnant, one of the first things I did was search for a pregnancy app. I was really disappointed with my options. The apps that existed were developed by men that didn’t seem to grok, in both design and features, what a pregnant woman wanted or needed.

Even more disappointing was how few apps there were for women in general.