My daughter did not sleep. She fought every nap as a newborn and woke through the night, and for months I spent something like seven hours a day trying to fix it. I wore her in the carrier and walked her back and forth in our longest hallway. I bounced her on an exercise ball while listening to audiobooks until my legs were aching. By the time the four-month sleep regression arrived, my husband and I were so overcaffeinated and so far gone that one morning he walked into the kitchen and found my cereal bowl sitting under the Nespresso, a fresh cup of coffee running down into my Cheerios. He still has the photo.

I had spent my career building go-to-market teams in deep tech, finding where systems were broken and building something better in their place. None of that was any help to me at 3am.

We found our sleep consultant through a personal recommendation, and it changed everything. I would pay for it again tomorrow without thinking twice. What I learned later was that we had paid roughly three times the going rate, with no way we could have known it, and no real way we would have found her in the first place without happening to know the right person.

When I started looking into this more seriously, I kept hearing the same story. A parent posts in a friend group and gets one reply. Or they would rather not be judged, so they are on Reddit at 3am instead, googling until the advice starts to contradict itself. A lot of parents stop there. They live with the broken sleep, the co-sleeping they never planned on, the workarounds that were only ever meant to be temporary, sometimes for years. You should not have to know exactly what to search for, or exactly who to look for, to get good help with your child's sleep.

The consultants were the other half of it. The more of them I met, the more impressed I was by what stood behind them: teachers, nurses, physicians, occupational and physical therapists, lactation consultants, doulas, trained parent coaches. And even knowing exactly what I was looking for, the only way to reach them was to cold-email one at a time on Instagram. What already existed for parents was usually gated behind a paywall or an employer benefit that almost no one has, or it read more like a concept than a tool you could use that night ("we're here for you, sign up and we'll tell you how"), and it swept every postpartum need into one pile.

SlumberMatch is what I wanted on that exercise ball. Vetted, credentialed specialists you can actually find and compare, matched to your child's specific situation, your approach, and a real price you can see before you commit. Whether what you are facing is straightforward or complicated, getting to the right consultant should take minutes.