The author
Jimenez Julien
Founder of MLJ, SASU and the person accountable for what DoulaDay does with a doula practice and its records.
Why I built DoulaDay
I build small, sharply focused software for people who run service businesses on their own terms. DoulaDay started with a conversation I did not expect to turn into a product. A doula in Charlotte, North Carolina told me that the hardest part of her work was not the twenty hour birth. It was the four weeks before it, when three due date windows overlapped, one client had not paid her balance, and the colleague who had promised to cover her was unreachable. She was running a real practice with real revenue on a paper diary and a group chat, and every scheduling tool she had tried assumed her work happened in fifty minute appointments.
That gap is the whole reason this exists. Appointment software treats time as a grid of slots. Doula work does not fit a grid. A client is not booked for the 14th at 10 a.m., she is booked for a window that might open at 38 weeks and close at 42, and during that window a doula cannot fly, cannot drink at a wedding, and cannot commit to her own children's plans with any confidence. Once I understood that the window is the unit of work, the rest of the design followed: pair a named backup to the window, attach the signed contract and the deposit to the window, and refuse to call a window confirmed until all of it is true.
I spent eleven months talking with working doulas before writing the first production line of this product. I sat with a two person reciprocal practice in Grand Rapids while they rebuilt their September on a kitchen table with sticky notes. I read twenty three doula service agreements, with permission and with names removed, to understand how fees, cancellation and postpartum hours are actually written in this trade. I listened to what happens when a birth goes long and the next client calls. I learned that the awkward part is never the technology. It is asking a colleague to commit in writing to something she has always given informally, and a good product makes that conversation easier rather than louder.
What I do not do is tell doulas how to practice. I have never attended a birth and I never will. My job is narrower and, I think, more useful: hold the administrative structure of the work so precisely that it disappears, and never make a doula prove to a screen what she already knows about her own clients. Every default in this product came from someone who does this for a living, and where a doula and I disagreed about how something should work, she won.
Experience and expertise
- Fourteen years building and shipping web software, the last six of them dedicated to independent service businesses rather than to enterprise buyers.
- Founder and publication director of MLJ, SASU, registered in Paris and publishing a portfolio of focused operational tools for small practices.
- Direct research with 47 doulas across 19 US states, covering solo practices, reciprocal pairs and metro collectives of up to fourteen doulas.
- Practical grounding in contract, deposit and cancellation practice in the birth work trade, informed by reading real service agreements with the consent of the doulas who wrote them.
- Hands on responsibility for data handling standards, including encryption, access logging, export and deletion policy across every MLJ product.
How this product is built and maintained
DoulaDay ships small changes often, and each one is written up in a plain language changelog inside the account. Nothing goes out on a Friday, because a doula going into a birth on Saturday morning should not be the person who finds a regression. Every release is checked against the same set of practice scenarios, including a double overlap, a backup declining at short notice, and a client whose deposit fails after the window has opened.
Editorially, every number on this website is one I can source. The 312 practices, the 1,140 births and the outcome figures are measured from account activity, not modeled, and they are refreshed when they move materially. Testimonials are published with the named doula's written consent and are shown as she wrote them, lightly trimmed for length and never rewritten for tone. Where we have not measured something, we do not put a number on it.
Support is not outsourced. Requests sent through this website reach me directly, and I answer them within one business day, in US business hours. If DoulaDay is the wrong tool for the practice in front of me, I say so and point elsewhere, because a doula who signs up for something that does not fit her season will churn within a month and be rightly annoyed at having wasted an evening on migration.
What I am accountable for
I am responsible for the accuracy of what this site claims, for the security of the records held in the product, for honoring cancellation without friction, and for keeping your data exportable at all times. If any of those slip, write to me and I will tell you what happened and what I am doing about it.
Published articles
These are the nine working notes I have published in The Call Bag, the DoulaDay magazine, each one answering a question a working doula actually asked me.
- How do I set up a backup doula agreement that actually holds when I miss a birth?
- Should I charge a flat birth fee or bill hourly for postpartum, and how do the two differ?
- What are the most common contract mistakes that cost doulas money in their first two years?
- What does HIPAA actually require of me as an independent doula who is not a covered entity?
- How does Medicaid doula reimbursement work in the states that now cover it, step by step?
- How many clients can I take per month before my on call weeks start to overlap badly?
- What should I pack and check before I leave for a birth call in the middle of the night?
- What changed for doulas when states began adding us to Medicaid, and where is it heading?
- What does a first overnight postpartum shift actually look like from arrival to morning handoff?
Contact the author
Write to jimenezjulien42@gmail.com with a question about the product, a correction to this page, or a request to talk through your own season. The request form on the home page reaches the same inbox, and the pricing section answers most of the commercial questions before you write.