Invest in Kids Care Finder

Introduction

Hi. My name is Olivia Rutman and I'm the Founder and CEO of Kids Care Finder. I also happen to be the mom of three young boys five and under, and I've struggled as much as anyone when it comes to finding childcare and other activities for my kids. While I was on maternity leave with my third baby boy, I had an overwhelming breakdown - this is IMPOSSIBLE. I had to find three different care options for three different aged kids. Not to mention all of the extracurricular activities, after school programs, and so much more that kids need, none of which I can search for based on their age, needs, and schedule requirements. And heaven forbid if my husband and I wanted to go out one night for our anniversary or other event, because finding a reliable, vetted babysitter seemed like nothing more than pipedream. Everything about the existing process today is broken, difficult, and overwhelming.

Every child is different. Every parent is different. Every family has different needs. Yet there's nothing out there today that caters to the needs of kids of all ages. Or to parents at any stage of parenthood. Why not? Every child is extraordinary in their own way, but they could not be more different, and they all have constantly evolving needs. Parents need help keeping up so they can spend less time mindlessly searching, calling, and emailing places just to see if they could be a fit, and more time with the reason in which they endure it all. These are my three reasons:

The problem

Actively searching for childcare can be the most frustrating, exhausting, and even impossible task. We are at a time when the gender pay gap is at the lowest rate in history, and most employers are struggling to recruit talent - yes over one million parents are driven out of the workforce each year due to lack of childcare. And this is much more than just a family issue - $122 billion is lost from the US economy each year due to childcare issues.

There are three main reasons the childcare crisis is so bad: Cost, access, and supply. Existing childcare websites are not working for America, because they are not addressing each of these three areas that makeup the problem.

If you are a parent, have you ever felt something like this?

The solution

Now that I've bummed you out and shown you how this is an enormous problem that impacts all Americans, let me show you how Kids Care Finder can help.

Kids Care Finder is a one-stop shop marketplace that connects families with all of the child-related care, activities, and service providers kids need from birth to grown in ONE place. It's like Angie's List for kids! And most importantly, our technology helps to reduce childcare costs, increase access to quality care, and helps to expand the total childcare supply in the US.

We serve kids of all ages, and parents at every stage of parenthood. From babies to teens, working parents to stay at home parents, public school kids to home school kids, we have something for everyone. All families also need core providers such as pediatricians and dentists, and some kids need additional support through mental health providers or special needs programs. Whatever your child's needs may be, Kids Care Finder will have you covered. And the best part? Parents can search for and message providers for FREE!!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQCFz9Y1MDA

A quick look at the competitive landscape and you can see that existing childcare websites are only addressing access, but they cannot really move the needle without addressing cost or supply, as those are the top two reasons parents are forced to leave their jobs. I'd also argue that some of them aren't actually even helping with access, as some of these competitors are charging families big bucks to use their platform, therefore making it less accessible for cash-strapped families.

So how do we tackle all of this? Let's start with cost.

On average, parents are spending 27% of their income on childcare. This equates to $18,000 per child per year. Those numbers are even higher here in California, and infant care is the most expensive of all. When you factor in the 30% families are spending on rent/ mortgage, plus the outrageous cost of things like food and gas, there's not much, if anything, left over.

Our industry disrupting nanny share category (patent pending), which allows two families to share a nanny and split the cost, can cut the cost of infant care in half, saving families thousands of dollars per year.

Now onto access. Because we offer a broad range of all childcare options in one place, we give parents a plan B, C, D, and so on if their plan A doesn't work out. This dramatically increases parents chance of success when finding a provider, especially if on a time crunch.

Additionally, our industry leading filtering capabilities make it fast and easy to find not just A provider, but the RIGHT provider.

Now onto supply. Currently, the childcare problem is larger than the childcare market itself. That means we have to grow the market. Our patent pending provider tools reduce tedious administrative tasks for providers, while helping them fill seats. This makes it much easier for more caregivers to open childcare centers, and helps to keep childcare centers open. We have many talented caregivers here in the US, but they don't all have the business and marketing skills needed to open a childcare center. We can help with that and allow them to focus just on the caregiving.

A couple of bonus advantages on top of cost, access, and supply, are provider vetting and all-around time savings.

We provide parents with so much detailed information about provider programs up front, including reviews and introduction videos, and all providers are licensed or background checked, making us industry-leaders in terms of vetting tools available to parents.

Additionally, our automation technology creates a massive amount of time savings for both parents and providers, streamlining much of the back and forth and the enrollment process. Currently, applications and enrollment forms for childcare centers are hours of tedious paperwork for parents, and information is often missing or incorrectly filled out, causing a nightmare for providers. Not to mention a complete lack of waitlist transparency that exists today --- I personally have been on waitlists for nearly three years --- will I ever get a call? We solve for each of these, and save parents thousands of hours over the years with our electronification of all of these processes and forms.

The childcare market in the US is worth over $65 billion. Right now we are hyper focused on the California market, and our SOM in California alone is $75 million. We do cover a lot more than just childcare and we will be expanding nationwide, so these numbers will only amplify as we grow.

We launched a San Diego based pilot in late 2023 and our customer acquisition cost (CAC) was around $20. This year, we have identified a very highly recommended marketing partner and will lead with a digital first approach leveraging cell phone data to do very targeting advertising. As a result, we can bring our CAC down to $9, and in 2024 we can reduce it even further to $6.

We will focus on social media mom influencers, ambassadors, and digital marketing to acquire parents. Ambassadors are making our provider lists and will be posting in local mom and community groups to help spread the word about Kids Care Finder.

To acquire providers, we will leverage direct email, partnerships, and government agencies. Government agencies are a huge opportunity right now. This is a got topic among legislators and there is funding being thrown at the problem without a plan to actually solve it.

We are estimating our average lifetime value of a customer (LTV) to be five years, conservatively. As we bring down our CAC and keep our LTV steady, our LTV/ CAC ratio will increase, hitting a very solid 42:1 by the end of 2025.

While we are technically a marketplace, we have a very heavy B2B revenue model, so I like to think of us as a SAASy marketplace (ha). We earn our revenue from provider subscription fees (1/3), Advertisisng and affiliate revenue share (1/3), and transactional fees (1/3). We do not charge the families to use our platform, supporting our mission of helping to reduce childcare costs.

While we are technically a pre-seed company, we have made a TON of progress on this concept with very little support. I took the company from idea to revenue in one year and one day with no Co-Founder, no advisors, and no funding. In just the past 30 days, we have built a new proprietary API to help supplement our provider acquisition efforts, resulting in us being able to upload data for over 30,000 California childcare providers into our system. In this time we also filed for our nonprovisional patent application, won two pitch competition at Irvine tech week, and began talks with several large-scale childcare providers.

We will be rolling all of our care categories out in phases, and will complete all phases by mid-2025. Currently, phase one is launched and in full swing.

Later this year we will also begin work on our AI powered childcare recommendation tool that will revolutionize the way families find care. Families will be able to come to our site and fill out a quick intake, and we will match them with the best childcare providers that meet their needs instantly, without them ever having to search. We will also be doing calendar integrations and predictive recommendations to surface childcare solutions to parents before they have even have time to worry about them. This technology will truly be - the future of family.

Ok now let's meet the team! My background is in financial services. I spent 15 years with Wells Fargo where I worked in a number of different roles across several departments. I did sales, leadership, and a lot of go-to-market activities. Half of my career in banking I spent on a sales enablement team solving complex organizational challenges. During this time I built new tools, processed, training, whatever the business needed me to do. I was the go-to-gal to get sh*t done! It was that skill set and background combined with my pain and struggles as a working mom that fueled me to create a better childcare solution, and one that worked for all families.

I'm thrilled to welcome my new CTO and future Co-Founder Todd Baur to the team! Todd is a former US Marine who has a ton of experience working both at large tech companies like Tesla and StubHub, and building multiple startups from the ground up. He's also a dad of two, so get very much gets the struggle.

Flash is our system architect who helped us entirely re-build our website from the group up to be better, faster, more secure, and more scalable. He also just may be one of the fastest coders of all time, very much earning him his nickname :-).

We have also added some amazing advisors. Silvia who is the female investor extraordinaire who is the founder of the famous Stella organization has been a massive help as I have worked through my fundraising efforts.

Mel was my first ever advisor, and she really helped me grow up and blossom as a founder in a very short amount of time.

Chris used to be the CIO of Yahoo Business and brings a wealth of knowledge and expertise to the table on the tech/ UI side of the house, and is an overall excellent source of wisdom and expertise.

Now let's talk money! We are raising our pre-seed round of $1 million to fund us for the next 12-18 months. Engineering will take up the bulk of the funds, and will allow us to do some much needed design enhancements, build out the rest of our care categories, add some new features, and begin work on our AI tool. Marketing will be the next largest bucket and will allow us to try several different forms of marketing to see what works best. We are partnering with a local marketing agency that purchases the cell phone data each night, so we are able to hyper-focus every ad dollar to our exact target market.

Here's a quick look at our fundraising roadmap and what we hope to accomplish with each of our rounds. We are targeting to get to profitability with each round raised, and we will through our Series A, possibly a Series B, and that will take us to our exit.

We are targeting a short, five-year exit to media giant IAC who loves nothing more than to buy marketplaces just like us. Care.com and Angie's List were both acquired by IAC for $500 million.

Our financials sum all of that up and show us reaching our SOM within five years.

So to sum things up, yes, the childcare climate is currently a disaster. But the good news, is that it doesn't have to be. America deserves better, and we can do better. But we can't do it alone. So please, invest in Kids Care Finder, so that together, we can help ease the childcare crisis in America.

Thank you!!!

Appendix

A quick look at our subscription pricing for providers. You can see here it's very high value for a very low cost.

We are a Kids for Peace Kindness Certified company and we are committed to being good to our people, our community, and our planet!

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