Nobody tells you how lonely it is. Starting a company as a solo founder is not for the faint of heart.

To be clear: I have a wonderful community of friends and family. I have a full life. People who love me deeply often ask how things are going.

And when they ask, I often tell them, "Great!" because in the macro sense, it is going great: I'm fueled every day by my mission, I'm inspired by people reacting to my vision and I love building.

Friends and family hear "great!" + 1 quick company update and they will nod and cheer and be supportive.

And then we move on to something else.

This is not a complaint. It's just a fact of company building: the decisions you're grinding through at 1am are ones no one in your life has a frame of reference for — not because they're not smart or caring, but because they're just not in the muck.

What I wasn't prepared for was finding the founder moms who are also in the muck.

Over the past year, I've quietly assembled a few groups of LA based women around me — mostly mothers who are (or have been) founders, many of whom are building in the parenting space — who just... get it.

We don't have a YPO charter or formal structure. But we do have a group texts that pings at strange hours with the unspoken agreement that when someone needs a little motivational fairy dust, the group steps up and sprays glitter.

I didn't know I needed this so badly… until I had it.

There is something particularly gratifying about building alongside other founder mothers: we know the specific arithmetic of guilt and ambition that lives in the beautiful, chaotic heart of a woman who is trying to do both things fully.

Mother of Invention was founded on the belief that motherhood deserves better tools, systems and design.

It follows, then, that the platform and brand I'm building should be more than a place for my own thinking: it demands to be a place that celebrates the women who are also building toward that same horizon — from their own angles, with their own tools, out of their own necessity.

So I'm starting something new: Mother of the Month. (I call this series Mother of the Week in the video interview embedded above, but I was clearly a bit ambitious on the day of shooting!)

My first Mother of the Month is the indomitable Melanie Kaplan.

She started her company oPPal (launching this week!) after she had her second daughter, Jade. But the origin story starts earlier, with Sienna, her first. When Sienna was four months old, Melanie collapsed on her kitchen floor, crying, telling her husband she couldn't parent anymore.

She was experiencing severe postpartum anxiety and depression: feeling trapped, suffocating, unable to leave a baby who needed her while also being unable to take care of herself.

She left her house for a few nights.

She found a waterfall.

She tried to recalibrate her nervous system by touching grass, going to the beach, looking at the sky.

She called her doctor.

She got on medication.

She came back.

Years later, she discovered a video she'd forgotten she made of herself during those days — crying at a waterfall, talking to her then-infant baby Sienna about this moment.

On a whim, she posted it to Instagram and woke up the next morning to hundreds of messages.

That was her light bulb moment. She didn't quite know what she was going to build, but she knew she had to do something.

What I've been watching her built is oPPal: a peer-based support platform that pairs new moms — Little oPPals — with experienced moms who are at least one year out postpartum — Big oPPals.

The Big oPPals go through a training program Melanie developed with psychologists, doulas, and midwives. Then they commit to three months of twice-weekly check-ins with their match. The check-ins are simple: Have you taken a shower? Have you eaten today? How are you… not the baby, you.

"The Big oPPal isn't there to add to the noise," she said. "They're really there to get their Little oPPal to a place of: you can trust yourself."

What I love about oPPal is that what it's actually solving isn't just connection for connection's sake. Rather, it's connection in service of a woman learning to listen to herself — at the exact moment when every other voice is loudest by way of the mother-in-law, the partner, the internet, the unsolicited advice.

Melanie spent months talking to OBs and doulas and psychologists before she built anything, asking the same question: where are the gaps? The answer she kept getting back was some version of: the system is overwhelmed and no one is really checking on the mom.

I think about the mothers I know who are building companies in this space because something happened to them, because they looked around and the thing they needed didn't exist.

oPPal didn't come from a whiteboard. It came from one of the darkest moments of Melanie's life in a puddle on the kitchen floor.

There's a version of Melanie's story that gets told as a recovery narrative: she struggled, she healed, she built something helpful. That version is not wrong, but it's incomplete.

What I find more interesting is what she said about her three-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Sienna: "I've trained her to say that what mommy does is that mommy helps the other mommies. It's really important to me that she understands why I am now choosing a path that leads me to having less time with her."

That's a narrative of transmission, not "recovery". The thing that happened to her becoming the thing she passes forward — to Sienna, and to every Little oPPal who wakes up one day not knowing how to listen to herself yet, and finds a Big oPPal waiting on the other side of a text message.

The oPPal waitlist is live. If you're a mom who's been through the postpartum journey and want to be a Big oPPal, you can apply.

If you're pregnant or early in your postpartum journey, same.

Find Melanie at @myopal on Instagram, and follow her personal account while you're at it — she is, in her own words, a Jew from the valley who will tell a stranger on a bench anything. In the best possible way.