How a Solo OB-GYN Scaled to 4,000 Questions a Month

Dr. Noa Sterling, a board-certified OB-GYN, built Sterling Parents in 2019 on a simple premise: pregnant people deserve better information delivered with more care. Her willingness to answer questions directly built a loyal audience, but the model had a ceiling. The core product was access to an expert's time, so growth meant either raising prices or burning out. Pregnancy generates a constant stream of urgent, personal, often frightening questions that arrive at 2 AM, not at the next appointment, and the internet's default answers skew toward the most clickbait-friendly, scary result. Before the product existed, members got answers as one-to-one Instagram DMs, sometimes waiting hours for a reply. Sterling Parents needed a way to make Dr. Sterling's expertise available to many more people, 24/7, without diluting the quality and care that defined the brand, and something that knew exactly when to say "talk to your doctor."

Sterling Parents partnered with Dewey to build Obi, a virtual pregnancy guide embedded in its website and mobile app (app built with AppIt). The name nods to the OB-GYN relationship while keeping the distinction crisp: Obi is a companion, not a clinician. Under the hood, Obi draws only from a knowledge base of 1,900+ documents published by Sterling Parents, with zero general web content or parametric knowledge, so every answer is grounded in Dr. Sterling's own expertise. 92% of questions receive an immediate, grounded answer; the system is deliberately designed not to answer everything, since in a medical domain a 100% answer rate would be a red flag. Safety guardrails reflect Dr. Sterling's philosophy: Obi never tells a pregnant person to "just relax," never surfaces unvetted speculation, warmly redirects lab-result questions to a provider, and routes medically risky questions to the care team with clear, specific language. Unanswered questions are captured as content-gap insights and aggregated so the team can prioritize new content. Because 40%+ of questions are asked by more than one member, every gap filled compounds, raising the answer rate sustainably over time.

The build started from a hard constraint: Obi could draw only on Sterling Parents' own material, never the open web or a model's parametric memory. The team assembled a knowledge base of more than 1,900 documents Dr. Sterling had already published and wired the assistant to retrieve and answer strictly from that corpus. Just as much work went into teaching Obi when not to answer. The team encoded Dr. Sterling's care philosophy into explicit guardrails: never tell a pregnant person to 'just relax,' never surface unvetted speculation, acknowledge lab-result questions warmly but hand them back to a provider, and route medically risky questions to the care team in clear, specific language. Unanswered questions became a feedback loop, captured as content-gap insights and aggregated so the team could prioritize new material against real member demand. Obi launched first on the website, then moved into a mobile app built with AppIt, where monthly sessions jumped fivefold and adoption compounded as filled gaps raised the answer rate.

Best fit for content-rich expert businesses (solo practitioners, creators, associations, and health or professional-advice brands) whose growth is capped by one expert's time and who need to scale trusted, on-brand answers without crossing into regulated advice.