Hi, designer here, and also someone whose friends have done a bunch of Kickstarters, and have written about their experiences.

I see two core issues, and neither are readily fixable.

First, "I've received nothing but positive feedback on both the concept itself, and on the Kickstarter project, from individuals ranging from 20-something techie dudes to 60-something mothers of 5. Everyone loves it, in theory."

Second, "Finding backers has been like squeezing blood from a stone, even after nationwide exposure on the #1 morning show."

I'll take them in reverse order.

"Kickstarter is not a store," and Kickstarter means this two ways. As a consumer, there's a chance you won't get your product, or it won't be high-quality, or won't be what you expected, etc. But as a project starter, it also means there aren't roving bands of consumers looking for something to buy.

Common metrics for Kickstarter projects say that if you don't have a large enough social network to get you 25-33% of the way to your goal in the first 24-48 hours, you won't succeed. That's not a factor of money; you don't want one wealthy aunt to contribute $3,000. It's a factor of social reach. This is because most of your funders are people who know you, and their friends, and their friends, and their friends. You get bumps from strangers with media coverage and social networking, but that's not a primary means of finding backers. Expectant parents are not stopping by Kickstarter to shop for baby-tracking apps between Target and Baby R Us.

That means you needed $3k in expectant parent friends on day one, and you had $1200. Kickstarters aren't slow grinds to success, they're two big bumps: beginning and end. You have three reward tiers which don't require someone to actually be invested in your application, you didn't regularly post backer updates to keep engagement up, and you had no user comments for a month. You didn't have enough traction, because you didn't try to get enough traction before you started. Everything is marketing.

Sure, some of the lack of viral spread might be bad timing -- more babies are born in September than any other month, and once the baby's here, you're too busy to discover and use a new app. Maybe you need to be pitching this nine months ago, or again after the new year, to newly-pregnant parents.

Or, maybe everyone loves it in theory, but experienced parents know they would never, ever use it. And that's the first issue.

There's one sentence in the entire video + text description that describes a benefit for a parent in using your app. "You can use the data you collect to identify patterns in your infant’s life, useful for narrowing down the causes of sleep problems or watching for allergies or illness, and to track growth and development over time."

That's it. The rest of the video+text talks about the app itself, which doesn't tell me why I'd want to use it.

That tells me there isn't a use case for your app. You are one parent with one data point about how you raise your (first!) child. You emphasize personalization in the app because you don't know how other families work. Your experience is not universal, and neither is your desire to collect data.

There are baby tracking notebooks (the paper kind), and there are sites like Trixie Tracker, and they have very niche audiences, because people have been raising babies without apps for thousands of years. A parent has enough to do without figuring out correlations in data on their own from the data they laboriously log in your application.

If you don't basically live on sites like Trixie Tracker, talking with their users, discussing the shortfalls of it and related apps, how can your app be any better? How can it provide real value?

If you're not literally living with other new parents and collecting data for them, so you can figure out the correlations and provide advice to them, and see if the advice works, how can you be sure your app will provide enough actionable information once people start logging data in it?

This is an app you're building for yourself, not for other parents with newborns, and you don't know enough people who want to support you financially in doing that.

If I was hired tomorrow to fix this app, the first thing I'd do is a literature review of common problems new parents face, and common questions and concerns, and common patterns of sleep and sickness, etc., etc. The thing new parents want the most is reassurance everything is normal and okay. You could probably draft a new version of the app to start testing just from existing literature, instead of your own experience.

Then I'd make you decide if your market is obsessive-compulsive data nerd parents, the kind who already use trackers, or if you're trying to make something for a general audience.

For data nerd parents, I would then camp out on every baby-tracking stats site and app, and start spending days and weeks living with new parents, to figure out not just how to log data most effectively, but also, what are the things they're not getting out of their current trackers and why? And how do those things change as their experience as parents changes (second kid tracks different things than first kid) and as the kids age (older kids track different things than younger kids).

A general audience includes Android phones, and doesn't pay for apps, for starters. But a general audience also wants more immediately actionable data, "I have a specific problem, I want to put a bunch of data in, and I want the app to tell me what to do about it." That's a different app from what you've got going on right now.

The net effect of doing all that real-world legwork means when you're ready to restart your Kickstarter (in 18 months), you'll hit your 25-33% goal in 24-48 hours, because you have enough of a network of invested users now.