Solid Starts: How a Ballerina Built a 6M-User Baby App

Key Takeaways:

Jenny Best danced with the New York City Ballet, then started an Instagram account about feeding babies in March 2019. It became Solid Starts.
The Solid Starts app now has 6 million users and a 4.9-star rating from more than 42,000 reviews on the App Store.
The free First Foods database is the funnel. Subscriptions run $19.99/month or $99.99/year on top of it.
She built it with no venture capital, no sponsorships, and no affiliate deals. The audience pays for the product, and that's the whole model.

The Solid Starts app answers one question parents ask thousands of times: can my baby eat this? Type in any of 400+ foods and it tells you how to serve it safely at every age. Six million people use it. It holds a 4.9-star rating from 42,113 reviews, one of the highest of any parenting app on the App Store. The founder is not a doctor, a dietitian, or a tech person. Jenny Best is a former professional ballerina who got tired of googling at 2:45am. Most creators would have turned that expertise into a $27 PDF and a brand deal with a high chair company. Best built a database, then an app, then a company. Here's the playbook.

Who Is Jenny Best?

Jenny Best danced professionally with the New York City Ballet before working for New York City government and then an anti-hunger organization in rural Kenya until 2015, according to Romper's profile of the company. No nutrition degree. No startup background. Then came kids, including twins, and the problem that started everything: introducing solid food. The information she needed was scattered, contradictory, and paywalled. One frustrated 2:45am search session became the founding story. In March 2019 she started an Instagram account about real food for babies. It grew into @solidstarts, which now has 1.6 million followers. Her early hires were not marketers. They were a pediatric feeding specialist and a pediatric occupational therapist, and the team grew into a bench of pediatricians, allergists, and dietitians. That ordering matters. She built credibility infrastructure before she built a product. When your app tells a parent how to serve a grape to a 9-month-old, trust is the entire product.

How Did a Free Food Database Become a Business?

By giving away the thing everyone else charged for. Solid Starts built the First Foods database, a free reference covering hundreds of foods, how to prep them by age, and allergen guidance. Parents searching "can babies eat strawberries" landed on Solid Starts pages, joined the Instagram audience, and told other parents. Starter Story's breakdown traces the sequence: Instagram community first, word of mouth, then crowdfunding from that audience to fund the app build, with revenue from guides and video courses along the way. The company was bootstrapped from day one and is profitable. The app shipped on the App Store in May 2021. Five years later it has 6 million users, sits in the top 50 of the Education category, and carries a rating most apps never touch.

Notice what she did not do. She did not build the app first and hope. The audience funded it, which is the strongest form of validating your app idea before building: people paying real money before the product exists.

What Does the Solid Starts App Cost?

The base app is free, including the full First Foods database. Paid tiers unlock meal plans, the Compass guidance program, and the food tracker:

Tier	Price	What You Get
Free	$0	First Foods database, 400+ foods
Unlimited Monthly	$19.99/month	Meal plans, courses, tracker, Compass
Unlimited Yearly	$99.99/year	Everything, roughly 7 months free
Digital cookbook	$16.99 one-time	100+ baby-friendly recipes

Run the math on that annual tier. At $99.99 a year, it takes just 10,000 paying families to clear $1M in annual recurring revenue. Solid Starts has 6 million users to convert from, and every one of them arrived with a problem the free tier already proved the company could solve. This is textbook creator subscription pricing: a free layer that builds trust at scale, a monthly tier for the intense six-month window when parents need it most, and an annual tier priced at half the monthly rate to lock in the full journey from first bite to toddler meals.

No Ads, No Sponsors, No VC

Best refused the standard creator playbook. Per Romper, Solid Starts has never taken sponsorships or affiliate deals, and it has not accepted venture capital. When a baby-food brand offers money to an account that parents trust for safety advice, saying yes taxes the trust that makes the whole thing work. The revenue model is clean: parents pay for the product because the product is worth paying for. That discipline turned an Instagram account into an asset. In 2025, HarperCollins published the team's book, Solid Starts for Babies, and Best now holds the founder and executive chair title of a real company with a specialist team behind it. Compare that to the creator who monetizes the same audience with brand deals. Their income stops the day they stop posting. Best's subscriptions renew whether she posts or not. That's the difference we keep pointing at: a creator rents attention, a founder owns a revenue line.

Trust is the product.

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The Free Database Is the Funnel

What is baby-led weaning? Baby-led weaning is an approach to starting solids where babies self-feed real food from the first bite instead of being spoon-fed purees. Solid Starts became the definitive resource for doing it safely. Owning the definitive answer to a searched question is a growth channel that never sleeps. Parents don't discover Solid Starts because the algorithm smiled on a reel. They discover it because they typed a food into Google or the App Store search bar at nap time. New users arrive daily who have never seen a single Solid Starts post. The app generates its own content engine too. Every new food added to the database is a post. Every allergen question answered is a carousel. Every milestone a family hits inside the app is a story worth sharing. The product feeds the content, and the content feeds the product. Dr. Becky Kennedy ran the same play with Good Inside, turning parenting expertise into a subscription platform instead of a content treadmill. Parenting is a niche where the problem is urgent, the user is motivated, and the willingness to pay is proven. The pattern travels to any niche where people search for answers at 2am.

3 Lessons From the Solid Starts Playbook

1. Give away the reference, sell the guidance. The free database built 6 million users' worth of trust. The paid tiers sell the personalized layer: meal plans, tracking, step-by-step programs. Free answers the question; paid walks you through the journey. 2. Borrow credibility before you need it. Best hired feeding specialists before building the app. In any trust-sensitive niche, the expert bench is not overhead. It is the moat, and it's why 42,000 reviews average 4.9 stars. 3. Let the audience fund the product. Crowdfunding the app meant validation and capital in one move. Your audience isn't just a distribution channel. It's the first investor that never asks for equity. The uncomfortable part: Best did this from a standing start. No existing audience in 2018, no technical background, no outside money. If she could build a software company from an Instagram account about mashed avocado, the "my niche is too small" excuse doesn't survive contact with the evidence.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many users does the Solid Starts app have?

Six million users worldwide, according to the company's App Store listing, with a 4.9-star rating across more than 42,000 reviews. The app launched in May 2021.

How does Solid Starts make money?

Subscriptions: $19.99/month or $99.99/year for meal plans, courses, and the food tracker, plus one-time digital products like a $16.99 cookbook. The core First Foods database is free, and the company has said it takes no sponsorships or affiliate deals.

Who founded Solid Starts?

Jenny Best, a former New York City Ballet dancer, started it as an Instagram account in March 2019 after struggling to find reliable information on starting solids for her own kids. The company was founded in 2020 and remains bootstrapped.

Do I need medical credentials to build an app in a trust-sensitive niche?

No, but you need people who have them. Best hired pediatric feeding specialists early and built the product on their expertise. Credibility can be assembled; it doesn't have to be inherited.

How much does it cost to build a creator app?

Most agencies charge $50,000 to $200,000. Built by Foundry charges $0 upfront, ships in about three weeks, takes a revenue share, and runs the app forever after launch.

Bigger Than the Follower Count

Solid Starts has 1.6 million Instagram followers and 6 million app users. Read that again. The product's audience is nearly four times the social audience, because the App Store finds people the algorithm never will.

That's the ceiling most creators never see past. Your follower count is not your market. Your market is everyone with the problem you know how to solve, and most of them have never heard of you yet. Jenny Best built it. Your turn. Want to turn your expertise into an app your audience pays for monthly? We build custom apps for creators, $0 upfront, 3-week delivery, and we handle all the tech forever.

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