FLT is covering the 2013 Startmate accelerator program, which aims to help early-stage companies become enduring internet companies. Here, we introduce Dan Walker and Dan Day of Kinderloop.
Kinderloop has had a good week. Actually, it’s been a great week. The company has secured its first paying customer, Big Fat Smile, for its social network for pre-schools and parents; a chain of five pre-schools in Wollongong. In fact, Dan Day, is on the road today doing media with local stations WIN TV and ABC Radio about the group’s adoption of the technology.
He’s left co-founder Dan Walker at the ATP offices to cut code and continue working through the list of centres wishing to trial the platform — Day is not technical so is spending most of his time talking to customers.
“It’s working very well,” says Walker. “Dan is definitely the talker and hustler and doesn’t want to get involved in the tech.
“From my experience, talking to people is way more important than writing code. Techies are always guilty of this — it can be easy to spend your day just coding.”
Preschools can upload photos and news about each child throughout the day, and get notified by email or SMS what their child has been doing. It’s good for pre-schools, as it replaces some of the mandatory reporting they are required to do, and gives parents a better insight into what their children do during the day.
Startmate’s two Dans met late last year. Walker had been doing some contract work for the Department of Education, and had been playing with a few ideas for a new startup, following an eight-month stint with Nikki Durkin’s 99dresses in San Francisco. He hit on an idea for a Yammer-style tool for teachers to communicate with students, but after conversations with a bunch of teachers he found it near impossible to sell.
By that point, he’d started talking to Day, who had a child at pre-school, and had suggested that might be a better market. Believe it or not, Kinderloop signed up its first users with little more than a glossy pdf document they had on an iPad. They pretended it was an app, and people believed. By mocking up a site in Adobe Illustrator, Walker and Day were able to show people how the app worked. Now, they knew people wanted their idea and set about building it.
“We got mentioned in this childcare blog that lots of pre-school teachers read. At that point, our inbox started to fill with people wanting to join,” says Walker.
There are 10 centres currently trialling Kinderloop, with 70 more on the waiting list. Much of the ‘onboarding’ is still manual, and Walker is keen to improve the sign-up process. Hopefully, Kinderloop will achieve its first unassisted sign-up in the next fortnight. That’ll mean testing the process with some new users to find where customers are getting stuck. Kinderloop will adjust the signup steps to make them simpler.
Kinderloop founder Dan Walker (Image: Zach Kitschke)
Currently, Kinderloop is available on the web and iPhone or iPad. You couldn’t hope for better engagement — Walker says there is a 100% open rate for parents who receive emails about their children. The challenge is getting centres at the other end to post more content. The top centres are posting between 20-30 posts a day. Another challenge is ‘filling’ the sales funnel; while there are 70 customers on the waiting list, Walker wants to make sure there is ongoing and growing demand.
“At the moment we’re targeting preschools but the end goal is for any place that looks after your child, like a sports club, to be able to use Kinderloop. For parents it’s piece of mind, knowing what your kids are doing.”
Startmate coordinator Niki Scevak describes the ‘5, 50, 500’ growth of a startup’s users: the first five are most likely people you know directly, the next 50 you’ll need to reach out to through your extend network and maybe the media, but any higher and you need to be generating some kind of natural growth.
Walker sees Startmate as an opportunity to test everything about the business model. The Kinderloop founders took part in a mentor roulette session the other day, meeting with eight Startmate mentors for 15 minutes. They were seeking advice on pricing, and how to generate new demand.
“If I had any knowledge to impart, it would be to talk much more, not to code. I’m 35 now and I’ve wasted so much time building things people don’t want.”
The pair are still trying to determine their pricing. They’ve picked a figure for Big Fat Smile, but need to test this with other customers, and make sure the figure supports their costs. For now, they are charging a monthly subscription fee per childcare centre. However, there is potential to charge parents for a premium version allowing them to access their child’s feed in real-time, rather than just receiving an end-of-day update.
Decisions like this are made with the support of mentors, but ultimately the founders have to make the call. You can ask everyone for advice, but in a startup there’s no right answer. Every company is different. Channeling Pollenizer co-founder Mick Liubinskas and his infamous ‘focus’ talk, Walker says no-one knows your business better than you. Yet, every startup is one big experiment.
For example, Walker couldn’t have known that childcare centres would decide to purchase iPad minis for their classroom, and teachers would use them with plug-in keyboard. The problem: the current app doesn’t rotate, making it hard for child carers to upload information. This necessitates an app update, although it’s something you could only realise after testing with customers.
“If you view your startup as an experiment, then you could consider you’re using the Startmate $50k investment to support 50 different experiment. Of course you know the rough direction you should take, but you need to test it.”