Why I Built It

Having a daughter is the best thing that’s ever happened to me.

That part is easy to say, because it’s true. She changed me in ways I didn’t expect, and all of them are for the better.

It’s also the most challenging thing I’ve ever had to do.

Not because of the logistics. I was warned about the diapers, the lack of sleep, the schedule changes. That stuff was hard, but manageable. You adapt. You figure it out.

What I wasn’t prepared for was everything happening internally.

The questions started stacking up fast. Do I need to be a completely different person now? Does ambition still fit, or is that supposed to change? Am I allowed to care about the same things I cared about before, or does that make me selfish now?

Some of those questions were probably ridiculous. Some of them stuck with me longer than I expected.
I felt on edge a lot. More reactive. More in my head. I never meant to take that out on my wife, but I was clearly carrying more than I realized. At times it made me wonder if I was cut out for this at all. If I was becoming someone I didn’t recognize. If I even deserved to be a dad.

That was the part that scared me.

From the outside, it didn’t look like anything was wrong. Every dad I saw online seemed to have it figured out. Other dads I knew looked solid. Calm. Confident. Everyone looked like they slipped into this role naturally, while I felt like I was constantly searching for the feeling I was supposed to have.

I kept wondering why I didn’t feel the way I thought I should feel.

The turning point came in a pretty unremarkable way. I caught up with a friend who became a dad a few months after me. We hadn’t talked in years, so it started as a normal catch-up. Jobs. Life. The usual.

Then we started talking about being dads.

Within minutes, it was obvious we were dealing with the same internal stuff. The doubts. The pressure. The quiet fear of messing it up. He said things I had been thinking but hadn’t said out loud to anyone.

That moment hit harder than I expected.

It wasn’t just relief. It was clarity. I wasn’t broken. I wasn’t failing some invisible test. Other dads were going through this too. We just weren’t talking about it.

And that’s when it clicked.

This part of fatherhood doesn’t really show up anywhere. You see the polished stuff on Instagram. You see jokes about being tired. You see the surface-level struggles everyone already understands.

What you don’t see are the internal battles. The identity shifts. The self-doubt. The questions that don’t have clean answers. I had never seen those surfaced honestly, at least not in a way that felt normal or safe.

So I decided to build something.

Not a content platform. Not a motivational space. Just a place where dads could tell real stories, share real experiences, and be honest without feeling like they needed to clean it up first.

Pophood is built around that idea. No polish. No pretending. Just people talking about what this actually feels like. A way to help each other out, but also a way for me to work through my own thoughts without carrying them alone.
And to be clear, this didn’t happen in a vacuum.

My first year as a dad came with plenty of extra weight. I was impacted by company-wide layoffs, went through the job search and interview grind, ramped quickly into a new role (fortunately with a great company and anamazing team), and wrapped up grad school.

I was also working through a long-standing personal challenge and making real progress for the first time in a while. I might share more about that later.

None of that is a sob story. A lot of it was good. Some of it was stressful. All of it happened at once. It added context to why my head felt as loud as it did.

Building Pophood became a way to slow things down. To create space. To take the stuff that was bouncing around internally and put it somewhere constructive.

If people use it, that’s incredible. If it helps someone else feel less alone, that’s even better.

But even if it stays small, or even if it never really takes off, it already did something important for me. It gave me a place to process, reflect, and remember that I’m not the only one figuring this out as I go.

That’s why I built it, and why I’m continuing to.

And Carlo Ang, if you’re reading this, thank you for that convo.