So what is a startup for moms by moms up to at 500? Kicking butt, of course!
Like many other startups that hustle to get into 500, we crashed an invite-only New Year’s party. We found an unsuspecting & tired Dave McClure, and excitedly pitched the most useful thing ever in the entire universe for a mom (or something like that).
It is quite easy for us to get excited about what we do. We’re after all a company built out of the frustration that no one else thinks our problems are important enough to be solved. Why $2.1 trillion seems a trivial market for Silicon Valley to pursue, we know not, but that parents need help spending $20 billion on kids after-school activities and summer camps, we know quite well, so we’re determined to help them spend it right. And let’s not forget the vendors, over 50% of whom are paying us because of the order of magnitude better conversions they get from our site compared to similar channels; we are determined to continue to awe them.
And we’re not stopping there. Heck no! We’re not resting until all the problems every fellow mom encounters finding the right local services for her kids are solved. It’s a real problem, our problem, and we’re determined to make the lives of our everyday unsung heroes a little easier. (Yep, we just called ourselves everyday unsung heroes. We have pictures in capes to prove it.)
And this is where the 500 mentor network has been super helpful so far. (No, not the cape part, the solving the problem part) In this short time we’ve been here, the conversations with just a handful of mentors, leveraging their combined experience, has just been a goldmine of information, leap-frogging our growth and stopping us from going on wild goose chases. It’s not just time and money that was saved, but the frustrations and consequent greying of hair! Talking to someone like Dave Schappell about vendor acquisition and retention; Bret Terrill about game mechanics; Evan Nisselson about community building; Jason Hreha about design; James Levine about two-sided marketplaces & Chris Turitzen about awesome ideas for FB fan acquisitions around Hallmark & non-Hallmark Holidays – none of which would’ve been available to us just a month ago when we were on the “outside”. This, we already know, is just the tip of the iceberg. We see everyday the 500 family very active on the internal dashboard talking about everything from advisor stake to immigration attorneys to joint Mother’s day campaigns. The network has amazing people proudly proclaiming #500strong.
We’re very excited to be a part of this family. As a startup built by moms, our favorite self-made quote is “it takes an entire village to build a company”. We’ve always known that it’s the people who are going to make the difference, and we are always looking for the right people who can help make the dream of every busy frustrated mom a reality. You can help too: if you have big brains, we can use your help; if you have a loud mouth, we can use your help; if you have big pockets, we could use your help too. Come join our family and let’s kick some butt!