Automating Bottle Safety
for Sleep-Deprived Parents

Approach

Dualboot joined the project at kickoff in late 2024, working directly with Roxie and her team to take the hoop concept from an early prototype to a live app on both iOS and Android by mid-2025. The engineering team flexed with the work throughout, scaling up through active development sprints and back down as we headed into soft launch, so Roxie wasn’t paying for capacity she didn’t need.

Implementation 

We turned CDC storage guidelines into simple flows: every screen (Add Bottle, Feeding, Wash, Move To vs. Edit) mapped to a specific rule about how breast milk and formula age. Move To shifts a bottle from a colder location to a warmer one; a parent can’t move milk from warm to cold, which matches food-safety guidance. Edit corrects a data-entry mistake without resetting the bottle’s expiration clock, while Move To recalculates it. 

The interface itself leaned playful and high-contrast, with stoplight color coding (green, yellow, red) for expiration status that reads clearly in a dark room with a half-asleep parent behind the screen.

From there, key features included:

• A feeding and inventory engine built from scratch. We built the logic that tracks each bottle through its full lifecycle: added, fed from, moved, washed, expired. One rule shows the nuance required: if a baby feeds from the same bottle twice, the original start time still governs the two-hour expiration window instead of resetting on the second feed.
• A supply calculator. It tells a parent how many days of milk they have on hand, based on either tracked volume or bottle count.
• Family sharing. A partner, nanny, or grandparent added to the account sees the same real-time bottle status and gets the same expiration notifications, instead of relying on a text chain.
• NFC hardware that had to work differently on iOS than on Android. Each of the 18 hoop colors carries its own individually coded NFC chip, encoded in a deep link with both a unique bottle ID and a color ID. The hoops were custom-designed for HoopDee, and our team took part in the alpha and beta testing that confirmed the hardware the manufacturer delivered matched exactly what Roxie’s solution needed, on both iOS and Android.
• Notifications tuned to real expiration windows. Push, SMS through Twilio, and in-app alerts fire two hours before expiration, fifteen minutes before, and at expiration, on a separate schedule for frozen inventory.
• App store readiness. We built the privacy policy, terms and conditions, account deletion, and support contact flows both stores require, and carried the app through Apple’s and Google’s review processes to get HoopDee approved and live.

Beyond the build itself, we worked closely with Roxie on the UX decisions that make the app usable at any hour, especially late at night: reducing taps, simplifying flows for exhausted caregivers, and keeping each screen focused on the one data point a parent actually needs in that moment. 

We suggested adding haptic feedback to reinforce when a hoop pairs successfully with a bottle, and helped close gaps in the family-sharing flow so a caregiver connected to more than one family never hit a dead end. Roxie came in with a clear vision, and she stayed open to input from our team and from her own beta testers throughout, which made her one of the more collaborative founders we’ve built with.

“The Dualboot team did more than build HoopDee’s software; they became true problem-solving partners, working alongside us to navigate the countless real-world scenarios families face when managing a newborn’s milk.”

Roxie Alsruhe

Founder