When Shilpa Bhandarkar forgot to give her child a pound to exchange for a charity cupcake at school, her daughter was incensed. How could her mother do such a thing? Sharing parenting fails with her friend Amit Rai, Bhandarkar discovered that he had once forgotten to take his son to a birthday party – and an idea was born.
“We talked about the difficulties of managing school and family life when you work full-time,” says Bhandarkar. “We did a quick calculation around the number of events you need to keep track of. When we got to around 600 school, extra-curricular and social children’s events per year, we stopped and said: OK, that’s a lot. What can we do about it?”
Bhandarkar and Rai, who went to Harvard Business School together, came up with an app, Let’s Coo, which allows parents to organise all the scheduling and paperwork around their kids’ various activities in one place. They self-funded the pilot, then left their jobs and raised between £150,000 and £200,000 to fund the next stage. Let’s Coo launched in September and now has “a few thousand” users, says Bhandarkar, using the app an average of five times a day.
Of course, using technology to bring parents together isn’t new. Mumsnet launched in 2002 and Netmums in 2000. But now there’s a new wave of tech-savvy, Uber-era parents, who already use apps in their professional lives, and believe they can also solve their parenting problems.
It’s an enormous market opportunity, says Hina Zaman, founder of child health specialist access app WellVine and ParentTech, a new platform for those working on tech to make parent’s lives easier. “There are eight million families in the UK, spending £160bn each year. It’s a huge space. Within a few weeks of announcing ParentTech, 200 startup founders had signed up.”
So how can apps help parents connect? Managing a child’s school life is a lot easier when you can communicate with fellow parents, for example. Yet Classlist founders Clare Wright and Susan Burton found that when their children started new schools, many schools wouldn’t give out parents’ contact details – and they didn’t have time to hang around in the playground collecting them.
Their solution was Classlist, a private communications app which allows parents with children in the same class to stay in touch. Parents enter their own details and create their own lists. The data is private – it’s not shared with anyone, and the app is registered with the Information Commissioner’s office. These lists can then be used from everything to sending birthday party invites to finding someone who lives near you to pick up your child in an emergency.
Wright and Burton, who both have backgrounds in consultancy work, built the prototype of Classlist themselves and rolled out a pilot to parents in 70 schools. In May this year, they launched a crowdfunding campaign to raise £550,000 to build the next version and ended up with £900,000. It launched in September, has parents from 500 schools, with an average of five to seven new signups every day, and is funded by advertising.
“We think every school needs us,” says Wright. “There are 25,000 schools in the UK, so we have a lot of room for expansion. Without any marketing internationally, we now also have schools signed up from the US, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Hong Kong and mainland Europe. They all have exactly the same problem.”
Finding a good babysitter is another big issue. When Ari Last became a father, he was shocked how tricky it was. His wife didn’t want to use an agency – she wanted someone who came recommended by someone she trusted.
“I thought: in this day and age it’s crazy that this kind of issue is still as difficult as it’s ever been,” says Last, formerly head of commercial partnerships at peer-to-peer lending platform MarketInvoice. Together with fellow father Adrian Murdock, previously head of new markets at notonthehighstreet.com, they left their jobs and founded Bubble, an app which allows parents to recommend babysitters to their friends (and pay the babysitter at the end of the night, avoiding the inevitable cash-machine stop). They raised an initial £100,000 from investors and launched in July. There are currently around 2,500 people on the app, which is initially focusing on London.
And as society changes, so does parenting: new parents are now far less likely to live near their own parents, leading to increased isolation. A 2015 survey of 2,000 parents by the charity Action for Children found that almost a quarter said they ‘always or often’ felt lonely.
Marketing consultant Sarah Hesz knows how that feels. She met Katie Massie-Taylor in a cold playground. “I went up to Katie and asked for her number, which was the cringiest moment of my life and totally unlike me,” says Hesz. “We became friends, and we talked a lot about how it shouldn’t be so hard to make mum friends.”
The result was Mush, ‘Tinder meets NCT’ – an app which helps likeminded mums meet. Following the success of a local pilot, Hesz and Massie-Taylor, whose career background is in the City, raised £250,000 to build it. £150,000 came from Mustard Seed Impact, which focuses on businesses with social impact, and the rest from numerous supporters, family and friends. Funded by commercial partnerships – the first is with Johnson & Johnson – the site went live in April and now has 30,000 completed profiles with 55,000 connections made. The site is now crowdfunding with a target of £650,000. At the time of writing, £445,160 had been raised.
Like any market, there are pitfalls. “As we look at investing in this space, we look at companies who are working towards [providing apps for parents] and there is nothing of scale today,” says Abhi Arya, a partner at Sandbox & Co, which provides operational and scaling expertise to businesses aimed at improving education for both children and their parents. “Everyone is struggling for scale.” Many parents, he says, are suffering from too much tech, rather than not enough. “There are so many parenting apps, like health apps: which one should you go for? If you’re already on Facebook, you might think: why do I need another mum’s social network?”
His advice: look at the content that millennials – the next generation of parents – are consuming, and what platforms they’re consuming it on: Buzzfeed, Pinterest or Instagram? “How do you use new media, like videos, virtual reality or the internet of things? How do you build trust with parents – why should they follow your advice?” Zaman says the key is to do your research. “Talk to other entrepreneurs and founders who have taken the leap as well as your primary market research. Is there a real market opportunity around the idea that you believe in?”
But the new parenting entrepreneurs are determined to make a breakthrough. “I think the challenge for any app or service provider is that a new way of doing things is always a harder sell,” points out Last. “We are asking people to start booking babysitters in a very different way. So it’s about educating people.”
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