018: Designing Apps/Digital Products for Parents with Anne Halsall and Sara Mauskopf of Winnie

Parent Driven Development

Parent Driven Development

Episode 018: Designing Apps/Digital Products for Parents

00:24 Welcome, Anne Halsall and Sara Mauskopf!

Anne is the co-founder & head of product of at Winnie. Sara is the CEO.

01:12 Coming Up With Winnie: Providing Local Information for People With Children

• Great app to use for travel!
• Gives parents child-friendly reccomendations for activities, places to eat, things to see.

03:12 Content Moderation and Quality

• Winnie is a crowdsourced platform similar to Yelp or Quora where you can both ask questions or give advice.
• You can post under a pseudonym or anonymously in a community that is very well monitored and moderated.

05:23 Gathering Information

• Grew organically from private beta testing. The community would add members: friends and family.

06:23 Monetization

• Winnie is venture-backed.
• It's very important to keep the app free and accessible to all.

08:32 Building an App For and Around Parenting

• Parents are wonderful participants and well-behaved to boot.
• Content that could be considered harmful is not distributed.

11:06 How do you have time to be a parent AND work a full-time J-O-B?!?!

• Family-friendly workplace.
• Kids give you motivation.
• Attitudes towards parents are changing.

15:53 Winnie's Childcare Discovery Platform

• Links to the Licensing Database to make sure that places are legit.
• Childcare providers aren't necessarily web marking gurus -- many do not have sweet websites or the time/budget to create them.
• Rage-driven Development.

21:21 Holy Crap! Kids and Parents Exist in San Francisco?!

22:23 Topic Channels

• Connecting parents based on special interests.

24:10 Favorite Parts of Being a Parent and a Founder

27:11 Genius / Fail Moments

• Mandy: Her daughter reffered to Hillary Clinton as Harley Quinn (#Fail)
• Jess: Comparing voting to choosing between chocolate cake and ice cream (#Genius)
• Allison: Suggesting her toddler to "stop and think." (#Genius)
• Sara: Her daughter needs to cut back on the watching of Daniel Tiger after renaming her sister after the sister on the show! (#Fail)
• Anne: Her 4-year-old confused "voting day" with "boating day" and broke his heart. (#Fail)

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Panel

Chris Sexton
Mandy Moore
Josh Puetz
Jess Szmajda
Allison McMillan