BeAKid (Techstars 2022)

🧬 Our Roots

BeAKid is based in Boston Massachusetts USA.  However our team is comprised of people from all over the world.  Our CEO immigrated to the USA in 1989 at the age of 15 from the former Soviet Union.  His families roots go to Ukraine and Belarus. For the last 35 years he has been involved in work with a number of non-profit organizations and has worked on many projects helping those in need.  

Our team is truly international.  In US we have people who trace their roots to Ukraine, Azerbaijan, and China. We also have staff in Montenegro, Netherlands, Philippines, Indonesia and Brazil.

🌏 We are Techstars Alums. 

The experience was amazing. Within the program we narrowed down our go-to-market strategy, identified the best way to engage and excite our customers and built a product that our users love.

Here are a few words from Greg Raiz - the managing director of Techstars Boston.

🤷🏽‍♀️ We are on a mission.

• Give parents better access and save them time and money by providing the best platform to find, book and manage all activities in one place.
  
• Give service providers the best back office suite in order to manage registrations, payments, forms, communication, discounts and media. 
  
   

📈 $4000/year/family is spent on activities.

• Parents are having to work extra hard to afford different activities for kids. 
• Service providers don't have affordable way to reach their core audience.
  
  We are in the process of creating the most comprehensive database of every activity across US in every neighborhood and gathering data on pricing, availability and experiences in order to give parents choices. 
  
  BeAKid will become the go to place for parents who understand that we have the most information and the best user experience.  This will in turn allow service providers to begin to offer their programs through BeAKid and create an easy registration and payment path. 
  

👨🏿‍💻 Information is scattered and disorganized. 

• Parents are having to use multiple platforms to gather the information they need.
• Service providers are using up to 20 different tools in order to run their business
  
  We provide a single stop shop for parents to research, compare, book, pay for activities as well as connect to other parents to help with carpooling, recommendations and even trading of goods for kids activities. 
  
  For service providers we have created an amazing back office suite that covers all of their needs in one solution, saving them time and a huge chunk of money. 
  

🤹🏼 So many new options.

• More kids are participating in after-school enrichment programs then ever.  Parents are looking for in person places to take their kids after long lockdown
• Service providers are bouncing back from Covid19 and new shops are opening up in every town.  
  
  With so many enrichment programs opening their doors, kids are having more opportunities.  While some activities (math, swimming) are long term commitments, most are short term programs. That means parents are often on the hunt for the next thing within a 4-week time frame.  Activities are also constantly changing based on the age, season, interest and availability.  

🧘🏾‍♀️ Growth is key. 

• We have signed up service providers across US, UK, Canada, and Australia. 
• We have launched our marketplace for parents and have grown to 70K MAU
  
  Within the next two years we will SEO over 500,000 individual pages through Google, making us, by far, the most comprehensive aggregator of information for parents. 
  
  We are starting to get traction with franchises who are both in US and international.  
  
  We are also growing our partnership outreach with non profit organization that are on the state and federal levels.

🚣🏾‍♀️ Deliberate growth. 

• We have multiple subscription models for service providers, ranging from transactional model, to SaaS subscription model.
• Parents can use our platform for free. However we do offer a paid concierge service where we offer to help with research as well as booking
  
  We do realize the need for growth as a company while being very deliberate to make sure that our service to our customers is top notch.  

⚙️ Early success.

• We have bootstrapped our development and were able to create an amazing product with only friends and family rounds.
• Now that we are ready to sell and expand, it's time to take a large investment to allow us to hire the right people to move the company forward. 
  
  Our main needs today are to build a gold star team with passionate and dedicated people who are brilliant at sales, marketing and user experience.  
  

🏋🏼‍♂️ Why me?

As a father of 3 kids and previously an owner of an after-school STEAM program, I am uniquely positioned to understand both, the plight of a parent, as well as the needs and wants of a service provider.  I, along with my team, am looking forward to growing BeAKid to be a house-hold name and becoming the de facto platform for parents. 

👩🏽‍🏫 For Service Providers

Our SaaS solution is by far the most advanced tool that combines all needed features for an after-school program for a very affordable price.