If you talk to enough parents-to-be, you start noticing the same scene in their living rooms around month seven. A pile of unopened boxes. Three of the same kind of thing. A pram-shaped box behind the couch that nobody knows what to do with.

It's the same in every culture we've talked to. So why does it keep happening?

The coordination problem

Imagine you have ten friends and family members who all want to give your future child something meaningful. None of them know what the others are getting. None of them want to bring an envelope with cash inside (it feels cold). None of them want to be the one who shows up empty-handed.

What happens? Each person, independently, picks a "safe" gift, a soft toy, a sleepsuit, a teether. Each gift is, on its own, a perfectly nice thing. The aggregate is a small mountain of duplicated, mostly-plastic objects.

This isn't a failure of taste. It's a coordination problem. Each person makes a locally rational choice and the collective outcome is irrational.

Wedding lists already solved this

Look at how weddings handle it. Couples post a list. Guests claim items. Nobody buys two coffee makers. Nobody panic-purchases a generic vase. Nobody feels weird because the system told them what would actually be useful.

Baby gifts have no such system. There's a baby shower if you're lucky, but it covers maybe 10 friends out of the 50 people who will eventually want to celebrate the new child. The other 40 each show up with their own well-meant, uncoordinated thing.

What FromUs.to is, structurally

The way we think about FromUs internally is: it's a wedding list, but for a baby, and the "items on the list" are messages and a future instead of physical objects.

The page is the list. Anyone who loves the family can land on it and contribute the version of "showing up" that fits them: a written note, a photo, a small contribution to the future fund. Nobody duplicates anybody. Nobody has to guess what's needed. The kid ends up with a curated archive of love instead of a basement full of polyester.

That's all it is. We didn't invent gift-giving. We didn't invent investing. We just put a wedding-list-shaped layer on top of the moment a family expects a child, and we made the items on the list be things that don't end up in a landfill.

The version of "showing up" we lost

Pre-industrial families showed up for new babies with food, services and stories. The auntie cooked for two weeks. The grandfather built the cradle. Stories were told around the fire and survived.

The modern version of showing up is a stuffed elephant from Amazon. It's not anyone's fault, it's just the path of least resistance in a world where the older systems have eroded and nothing structural replaced them.

FromUs.to is one small attempt to put back the older shape. Not a stuffed elephant, but a written sentence and a long-running fund. Both of which the kid will still have when they're forty.