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Helping Parents Stay Organized and Collaborative at Home with Michael Perry, Founder & CEO of Maple
54 Plays2 years ago
Carly interviews Michael Perry, founder and CEO of Maple - a family tech startup aimed at easing the burden of parenting and helping families spend more quality time together. Michael shares the story behind Maple, how the app helps families get organized, collaborate on household tasks, plan events/appointments, and distribute the mental load more evenly. He discusses the integration of AI, machine learning, and partnerships to create a centralized home operating system. Michael also reflects on his journey as a serial entrepreneur and the evolution of his leadership style and company culture over time.
- Overview of Maple app features like shared folders, to-do lists, calendars, shopping lists, expense tracking etc.
- How Maple enhances visibility and collaboration between parents/caregivers
- Integrations with services like Instacart for grocery delivery
- Plans to incorporate AI/ML for proactive suggestions and setup assistance
- Michael's background as a 4-time founder, including a previous AI startup acquired by Shopify
- Building a family-friendly company culture with flexible work arrangements
- Overcoming app fatigue by providing a unified home management solution
- Growth through paid advertising on Instagram, Facebook, Google ads
- Designing the pricing model for Maple
Promo code:
Nessle users and listeners can try Maple Premium free for 60 days using the code "MAPLEPLUS60" after downloading the app.
Contact:
Michael invites collaboration opportunities and feedback at michael@growmaple.com
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Transcript
Introduction to Parent Tech Allies Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to Parent Tech Allies, where we share insights from the movers and shakers shaping the field of parent support from fertility through the teen years.
00:00:07
Speaker
I'm your host, Carly Buxton.
00:00:09
Speaker
Let's get started.
Meet Michael Perry: Founder & CEO of Maple
00:00:12
Speaker
Today on the podcast, we're welcoming Michael Perry.
00:00:14
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He is a proud father, uncle, brother, son, and husband, and he is the founder and CEO of Maple, which is a family tech startup looking to ease the burden of parenting, freeing up families to spend more quality time together.
00:00:30
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What a wonderful goal.
00:00:32
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Thank you so much for being
What is Maple?
00:00:33
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here, Michael.
00:00:33
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Thank you so much for having me.
00:00:35
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It's an honor.
00:00:36
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I'd love to start out with a little bit about the company that you've built.
00:00:40
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So tell us, in your words, what is Maple?
00:00:44
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So Maple is right now a mobile application, but we hope to soon be on web and iPad.
00:00:51
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But we're a mobile app that really truly gives parents the superpowers they need to stay more organized and collaborative at home with people.
00:01:00
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their household.
00:01:01
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So we build tooling from a folder system that allows you to get organized.
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And inside of those folders, you can add a to-do list, a checklist, a shopping list, an events list.
00:01:12
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You can do expense sheet tracking.
00:01:15
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So we give parents the tooling they need, the enterprise level tooling they need to run a really successful household.
Inspiration Behind Maple
00:01:20
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And is that exactly how it started?
00:01:21
Speaker
What was the earliest idea or iteration of Maple?
00:01:26
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I think the roots were always there.
00:01:28
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In the very early days of the company, the company was started out of the, I think, really sad reality that my wife and I, who had been together for almost 15 years and welcomed a new baby to our home, drastically changed the dynamics of our relationship in a really beautiful way, but also changed the needs of our house to be not just a couple living together, but really
00:01:51
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To build like a baseline operating system that allowed us to work better together to take care of our child.
Addressing the Mental Load on Moms
00:01:58
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And so the very early days of the product was making a list of all the work that needed to go into the home and for people to tag each other or request help on things that they didn't think that they were going to be able to get done.
00:02:09
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And then as I've become a father and now I have, when I started the company, my son was like less than one and now he's four.
00:02:16
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It's like, you learn quite quickly that just the workload is, is one piece of what goes into a home, right?
00:02:22
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Saying, take out the trash is one thing.
00:02:25
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calendaring system was really critical for a parent as your children enter school, as they have doctor's appointments, as they become involved with extracurricular activities, birthday parties, sporting events, all these different things.
00:02:36
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And so it became very clear that in order to build an operating system for the home, we really needed to build a calendaring system for the home to kind of match all the workload that goes into managing for your kids.
00:02:48
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And then that, again, kicked it up another layer, which is like things are really at the end of the day, the workload all has a root.
00:02:55
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And the root of that is the planning and organization that goes into taking care of the house, right?
00:03:00
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So one aspect that affects society today is that most moms are the ones doing the mental load of running the home and also the physical care of running the home.
00:03:11
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And there is a nice shift taking place of men participating more on the physical labor of running the home, but they aren't as involved in
00:03:19
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planning the trips, planning the birthday parties, planning the doctor's appointments, organizing Christmas.
Maple's Features: Event Planning & Task Sharing
00:03:24
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And so then we really started tackling that problem in a deeper way that allowed for more visibility into the home and more collaboration in the home so that everything didn't fall on one person's shoulders.
00:03:33
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So.
00:03:34
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Wow.
00:03:35
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Tell me more about that.
00:03:35
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Like how, how do you, how does it become more visible through the use of your app?
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I mean, would say a mom, for example, rather than diving into,
00:03:46
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planning a birthday party, she first puts it on her calendar and then the partner knows that like that's going on.
00:03:52
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Tell me a little bit about how that shifted workload.
00:03:56
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The first thing that a parent would do, I'd like to think that some dads take the initial step forward, but they would start a folder in Maple called birthday party.
00:04:06
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or Johnny's birthday party or Sally's birthday party, however they want to label that folder.
00:04:10
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And then they can invite whoever they want to participate inside that folder.
00:04:14
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So a husband can invite his wife, a wife can invite her husband.
00:04:20
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You can invite a nanny, a baby, whoever the stakeholders are.
00:04:25
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to that birthday party, you can invite them into the folder.
00:04:29
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Everything you put inside of that folder is completely visible and accessible to all participants of the folder.
Integration with Services for Family Management
00:04:35
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So if you put a to-do list,
00:04:37
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for like buy a cake, send out the party invites, buy the streamers, get the decorations.
00:04:44
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Like you start listing all the fabrics that go into weaving a birthday party together.
00:04:49
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Typically and historically, that's all lived inside of mom's head.
00:04:53
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And so she's the one who's the gatekeeper of the knowledge of all those moving parts of that birthday party.
00:04:58
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Once you start having it inside of Maple, it's visible to everybody else the workload that's involved.
00:05:03
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And you can start delegating and assigning various things to those individual tasks.
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So if you wanted to be responsible for buying the birthday cake, you can assign it to yourself.
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You can leave it unassigned.
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You can assign it to your husband.
00:05:16
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You can create a event list so that you know that on this day at this time, the birthday party is happening.
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You can create a shopping list of hot dogs, buns, ketchup, mustard, and you can create that entire shopping list of Maple.
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Again, accessible and visible to everybody.
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So if somebody wants to run to the grocery store, they have the full list available to them.
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We also partner with Instacart and we have a full Instacart integration.
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So you actually can buy the groceries directly inside of Maple.
00:05:42
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You could put a weather tile in there for the weather in Santa Barbara, California.
00:05:46
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And as the day is approaching,
Comparing Household Management to Business
00:05:48
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everyone's on the same page that rain is coming and that everyone needs to think about game plan B.
00:05:53
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So again, so much of our success has been about, I think people come to a relationship with good intentions and that somehow, some way we continue to fall in this very deep, dark trap that one person's going to be responsible for it.
00:06:08
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And then unless they take ownership on themselves to overly communicate, it just never, the workload never spreads.
00:06:15
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But Maple handles a lot of that communication and visibility to all participants of the household.
00:06:23
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It's very interesting that you shared that you and your wife were together quite some time before kids.
00:06:28
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My husband and I are the same way.
00:06:32
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And it's so different as many listeners would be able to commiserate with or sympathize with perhaps.
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Just that before children, it can stay in your head.
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Your own to-do list can stay in your head.
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You can get pulled to a work trip.
00:06:51
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That's right.
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It's exciting and there's nothing to figure out.
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And then when children come, it is the reverse.
00:06:59
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I mean,
Future of Maple: AI and Partnerships
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it makes everything so much more complicated.
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So I love the idea of having one place to keep everything.
00:07:08
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And I especially love the idea of integrations.
00:07:10
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I mean, tell me a little bit more about how you thought to include that in the development roadmap and then...
00:07:18
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what other integrations are you targeting in the future?
00:07:21
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I love the idea of like, almost like Mabel would know that I need to plan a party and it populate for me, like what I, almost like my to-do list and supplies and that sort of thing.
00:07:33
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So tell me a little bit about the integration side.
00:07:37
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Well, I think, you know, first and foremost, and I think it's really important to understand, and this was really important in the journey of Mabel of realizing that, you know, parenting specifically,
00:07:48
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Parenting is like running a company without the resources and tooling that a company has.
00:07:54
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So companies don't thrive, they don't make it without a tremendous amount of software helping them get the job done, a lot of people helping them get the job done, a lot of specialty people, an HR department, people who are head of engineering, people who are head of design.
00:08:09
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People who are, you know, marketing leaders, sales leaders, strategists, like companies are built of many people with many roles, with many talents, with lots of resources.
00:08:20
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Parenting, you are required to be many different people.
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You're required to be the head chef.
00:08:25
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You're required to be the administrative assistant.
00:08:28
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You're required to be the planner and the strategist.
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Like the similarities between running a company with endless resources and being parents with limited resources is like polarizing in so many ways.
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And the overlap is insane.
00:08:41
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And so, you know, I think that...
00:08:44
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For a lot of people, when they make that shift from being a couple to being a parent, we all fall into this plague of like, oh my God, now I need to do all that.
00:08:52
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I have to be running a business now.
00:08:54
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And I think that so much friction takes place in that.
00:08:56
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And for Maple, we are right now in the process, the generational process of building a platform that really is like the back office to your home.
00:09:05
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that you would turn to to run your business.
00:09:08
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And we've always envisioned this world where we're going to have the additional tools that might be outside of our domain expertise.
00:09:15
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Like working with Instacart has been great.
00:09:17
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We are not a grocery and delivery service company, right?
00:09:20
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But we build the tools to allow for people to meal plan.
00:09:24
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Meal planning is a huge thing on Maple's platform.
00:09:26
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Building a shopping list is a huge thing on Maple's platform.
00:09:29
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The last step of that, in terms of buying the groceries or delivering the groceries, that's not our business.
00:09:35
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And so we've been able to foster this really healthy relationship where we can bring that technology into Maple.
00:09:41
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And we're looking at a million other places within the app in this ecosystem of things that will allow for Maple to be the baseline of the planning and organizing and our partners to fill the white space on the delivery and execution.
00:09:56
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Right.
Michael's Entrepreneurial Journey
00:09:57
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If you're using Maple to manage your bills or using Maple to do some financial planning, we have some soft tools for that.
00:10:04
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You may want an Intuit integration at some point.
00:10:07
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You may want a college savings app to be integrated into Maple at some point or a bank account app to be integrated into Maple at some point and a billing system to be integrated into Maple at some point so that all of the things can still neatly live in this all-in-one kind of experience in place as Maple continues to be the back office of the home.
00:10:28
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So, you know, we're going down a very deep path right now in 2024.
00:10:32
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of trying to create an entire developer ecosystem and business that people can build on top of, on Maple's back, so to speak, and service parents in a more meaningful way with Maple as kind of like the
00:10:46
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back-end technology that they can build on.
00:10:50
Speaker
As it relates to the get things set up for you, make suggestions for you, we're actually working on a lot of that stuff right now.
00:11:00
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Some of it might be out right around the time that this podcast comes out.
00:11:03
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So hopefully if you're listening and you're interested in some of the work we're doing with AI and helping people get more set up and proactively helping them
00:11:12
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and you're listening to this, likely right about now we are rolling that out.
00:11:16
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So go check out growmaple.com or go to the App Store and download Maple to see what we've done.
00:11:21
Speaker
That's very cool.
00:11:22
Speaker
I knew AI would somehow play into this conversation because it's important for any business, but then also because of your own background.
00:11:29
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So I definitely want to get into to that a little bit.
00:11:33
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But first, let me ask about something that occurred to me as you were just speaking, which is
00:11:39
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almost like your ideal type of customer.
00:11:42
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I saw something, my husband sent me something around the end of the year of a couple, it was some Instagram thing where a couple goes and they book a conference room and they have a strategic offsite for their family.
00:11:57
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And we thought that was such a cool idea.
00:12:00
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Now, did we do it ourselves?
00:12:01
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No, because almost there, it was too hard to plan.
00:12:05
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We didn't really have a good...
00:12:07
Speaker
agenda to follow.
00:12:09
Speaker
So there, you know, I would love it if y'all do a blog post about that or something, but it feels like very type A is perhaps your target customer.
00:12:18
Speaker
How do you imagine your ideal customer?
00:12:22
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And then also how about those families where maybe somebody is really type A or really techie, for example, and the other person is a pen and paper or just approaches things differently?
00:12:34
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How do you see this customer profile playing out?
00:12:38
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Yeah, so there's three different things there that I want to break apart and touch on.
00:12:41
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The first is my wife and I do end of the year kind of offsite alignment things.
00:12:46
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And I think it's really important for couples to do that if they can find the space.
00:12:49
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It's harder when you have children.
00:12:51
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But even just like yesterday, it was Valentine's Day.
00:12:53
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My wife and I went on a lunch date because it was middle of the day.
00:12:57
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And half of the date we kind of went through, which may not sound super romantic, but we went through, we got caught up on a lot of the things that we need to do and realign ourselves as a couple on.
00:13:07
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So I think just like having good communication, you know, is really, really, really important.
00:13:12
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The beautiful thing for something like Maple is that we have a couples folder.
00:13:16
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So amongst everything else that we have going on, we have a couples folder where we keep our offsite agendas and our promises and our things that we have going on.
00:13:23
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And we treat our
00:13:24
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our relationship very much like a business relationship.
00:13:27
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I mean, we're romantically in love till death do us part.
00:13:32
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But I think we also recognize that we have a lot of responsibilities to our family that we need to be better at collaborating on.
00:13:38
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as any company does with co-founders.
00:13:40
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So really great for the Instagram video of whoever that couple was, I'd really encourage it.
00:13:45
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And oftentimes I tell people the best relationship advice I can give anyone is to simply just ask your spouse on Sunday night, what are you doing this week and how can I help you?
00:13:55
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So just wanting to put that out there for anyone that's a parent listening.
00:13:59
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As it relates to like our ideal customer, I think we're technology-based,
00:14:04
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Where technology plays a critical role in society is accessibility.
00:14:11
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And so, you know, what's great about the iPhone is it's made everyone a good photographer.
00:14:16
Speaker
Um, what's really great about Google is that it's given everybody the access to information.
00:14:22
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And I think that when you actually think of your customer in terms of a personality type, you're limiting who your customer can be.
00:14:28
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For Maple, I think that it's clear in the early days of success, if you're a person who wants to use a to-do list or a person who wants to be organized or a person who wants to, um,
00:14:40
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run a clean calendar.
00:14:43
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You know, that desirability is who we're speaking to.
00:14:46
Speaker
And it's our job, whether you're a type A or type B personality, or you have the soft skill sets or the hard skill sets.
00:14:53
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It's our job to actually make sure that we build the technology that fills that desire.
00:14:58
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That's what makes really great companies.
00:15:01
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Great companies fill a desire.
00:15:03
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And I think for most parents who is our customer, most parents wish life was less chaotic at home.
00:15:10
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most parents wish that their days were like slightly easier, that they weren't falling behind the eight ball, that they weren't like scattered brain.
00:15:18
Speaker
And like, they don't, they have a million different things going on.
00:15:20
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Most parents are trying to maintain a full-time job as well as caregiving for their children.
00:15:25
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And so like, I think that there's a desirability amongst many people who are responsible for children, let's say under the age of 13, for the role and job of
00:15:37
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at home to be an easier one.
00:15:39
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And that's the desirability we build towards.
00:15:41
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If you use Maple, regardless of your personality type or regardless if you have the right skill sets, we are committed.
00:15:50
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We are obsessively committed as a company to build the technology to deliver on that desire.
00:15:56
Speaker
Wow.
00:15:56
Speaker
So you're creating the types of customers who maybe would be using.
00:16:01
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We are giving people the superpowers to have what they want.
00:16:04
Speaker
Yeah.
00:16:05
Speaker
What a cool perspective.
00:16:07
Speaker
Let me ask a little bit about, as we dive into AI, let me ask a little bit about your founder journey.
00:16:13
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You're a second time founder.
00:16:15
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And I understand that your previous work was with
Creating Company Culture at Maple
00:16:20
Speaker
AI and it was a company that was acquired by Shopify.
00:16:24
Speaker
And so tell us a little bit about what it feels like to be a second time founder and what have you done differently the second time around?
00:16:35
Speaker
Well, truth be told, this is my fourth company, so I'm a four-time founder.
00:16:38
Speaker
Oh my gosh.
00:16:40
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I'm an old man in this young man's game.
00:16:46
Speaker
I think every time you build a business, you get a little bit better at it.
00:16:50
Speaker
And I think the longer time you're committed to something, you get a little bit better at it.
00:16:54
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So if you've been an executive at a company for 10 or 15 years, at your 10 or 15, it feels substantially... The challenges are different, of course, but you feel like you have a better grip on what you're doing versus your one.
00:17:10
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I think in a lot of cases...
00:17:13
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I've tried to mature as a human being through the process of being a founder.
00:17:17
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I think I'm much better at letting some things go, not being the owner of everything.
00:17:21
Speaker
I think when I was a younger man, definitely in the Kit era where Kit was super successful and we sold that company and then I went and had, I think, a really great career at Shopify.
00:17:34
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I think so much about that as a founder, you want
00:17:38
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you struggle with credit and you struggle with these are my ideas and you struggle so much with ego.
00:17:44
Speaker
I think at this point in my life, and I'm almost now going to be 38 this year, approaching 40, this is my 18th year building software.
00:17:54
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That's a journey that's taking me through four companies, two failed businesses, one sold company, 10 plus million dollars in raised capital.
00:18:03
Speaker
M&A transaction, billions of dollars worth of deals at Shopify.
00:18:06
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I think the one thing that I've learned at this point is that it is such a humbling journey.
00:18:16
Speaker
It is such a humbling journey.
00:18:17
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And I'm still just such a student trying to learn.
00:18:21
Speaker
And one of the things that I'm most proud about right now is not just the work we're doing at Maple, not just the products we're building, but really the company we're building.
00:18:29
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I get to be in such a unique position to hire great people to do really meaningful work.
00:18:36
Speaker
And we are doing things so differently at this company in terms of, you know, today someone joined our team who they're going to work part-time at Maple and they're full-time caregiver to their kids.
00:18:48
Speaker
Right.
00:18:48
Speaker
And so like not a lot of software companies do part-time work for parents.
00:18:53
Speaker
It's all or none.
00:18:54
Speaker
And approaching that differently and trying to build a culture that's not about just like drinking at every single happy hour and trying to build a culture that's about the right level of family flexibility and putting your family, like,
00:19:05
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So I think that what I'm most proud of or how things have changed is that I've just grown up.
00:19:13
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It's just that I started at 20 and when you're 20,
00:19:17
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You know, there's a lot of ego when you're in your 20s.
00:19:20
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I sold my company three days before my 30th birthday.
00:19:22
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There's a lot of ego when you sell a company to a publicly traded company at 29.
00:19:28
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And now I'm just like a student of life.
00:19:30
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And I'm just like, I understand empathetically, it's hard for everybody.
00:19:34
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And that teamwork is really the vehicle you wanna be on, not the you train, but the team train.
00:19:40
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I think that that's where I'm like most proud about my own just personal development and leadership development.
00:19:46
Speaker
I'm not just doing great things, but being a great person.
00:19:50
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And I think my track record speaks a lot to the doing great things.
00:19:57
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And now I think my track record that I'm trying to reshape and really the way that I would like to think about my career was more of just like being a fair human being and just being collaborative with everybody else on earth.
00:20:11
Speaker
I hear so many parallels to the conversations I have with parents, you know, right?
00:20:15
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Like I'm a postpartum doula and, and the parent journey is in so many ways, like the founder journey.
00:20:22
Speaker
I mean, you're thrown in the deep end of the pool.
00:20:25
Speaker
You try to act confident, but there's so much you don't know.
00:20:28
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And then there's a point where you just sort of step back and try to get in touch with almost like the kind of family or the kind of company you want to build.
00:20:35
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I really noticed some parallels there.
00:20:38
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It's true, though.
00:20:38
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You know, I think that, you know, I think the most important thing that probably we should all recognize.
00:20:49
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You know, I would I would challenge your audience and challenge you.
00:20:54
Speaker
Can you name the founder of BlackBerry right now?
00:20:59
Speaker
No.
00:21:00
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Can you name the founder of General Electric right now?
00:21:03
Speaker
The light bulb, right?
00:21:05
Speaker
Can we, I would bet you there's a lot of people who cannot name the co-founder of Apple, of Apple.
00:21:12
Speaker
Can the people that are listening right now name both co-founders of Google?
00:21:17
Speaker
Most people probably can't even name the co-founder of Microsoft.
00:21:20
Speaker
So you have to have the humility to know that you are not going to be remembered based on what you do.
00:21:25
Speaker
But there's a really great chance that you can be remembered by a small group of people based on who you are.
00:21:30
Speaker
And I think when you apply that thinking to building a company or a business, it strips the ego away because the journey becomes so much less about what are you doing for Maple versus how are you behaving at Maple.
00:21:43
Speaker
Because we're collectively building a Microsoft.
00:21:45
Speaker
That company will stand.
00:21:46
Speaker
We are collectively building a Google.
00:21:48
Speaker
That company will stand.
00:21:50
Speaker
We are collectively building a General Electric.
00:21:53
Speaker
That company will stand.
00:21:55
Speaker
That's how I think Maple will probably be around forever because I think parenting is going to be around forever.
00:21:59
Speaker
And I don't think that there's a better technology company out there than us.
00:22:02
Speaker
But no one's going to remember us individually.
00:22:04
Speaker
And this is where founders make a big mistake.
00:22:06
Speaker
The goal of any founder should be to find a problem that you are absurdly obsessed with and commit your life to it.
00:22:13
Speaker
And don't worry about you.
00:22:14
Speaker
Build a company that solves that problem.
00:22:16
Speaker
And if the company stands, you're great.
00:22:18
Speaker
Just like as parents, it becomes so much less about you and it becomes what?
00:22:21
Speaker
About your kids.
00:22:22
Speaker
And if you do your job, all is good, right?
Overcoming App Fatigue in Families
00:22:25
Speaker
And it takes a long time to acknowledge and accept that it's a hard road to become a Steve Jobs, or it's a hard road to become an Elon, or it's a hard road to become any of these people that may have a small chance of being generationally remembered.
00:22:42
Speaker
That's great.
00:22:43
Speaker
But you can do it though.
00:22:44
Speaker
Yeah.
00:22:46
Speaker
So you've chosen the problem of families being on the same page and workload balance and organization.
00:22:52
Speaker
And I think that, you know, you approached it in a way of building an application that helps people store their information, create lists, know what needs to get done and know what the other members of a household are getting done.
00:23:09
Speaker
So tell me a little bit about some of the biggest challenges that you've had in getting families to adopt families.
00:23:16
Speaker
the solution that you've built.
00:23:17
Speaker
So I'll give sort of an illustration.
00:23:21
Speaker
I meet a lot of founders in the work of building a marketplace that hosts businesses.
00:23:27
Speaker
And the other day somebody reached out and they've built an app for parents to know what's going on at their kid's school.
00:23:36
Speaker
I had this visceral reaction.
00:23:37
Speaker
I was like, no, I cannot download one more app that my kids' activities are on.
00:23:45
Speaker
And I imagine you probably face that kind of hesitation and reticence on the part of the user, no matter how open-minded or early adopter they are, about like, oh my gosh, another solution.
00:23:58
Speaker
So how do you frame up what you've built as the solution to end all solutions?
00:24:06
Speaker
Well, I think a couple of things.
00:24:07
Speaker
One is app fatigue is certainly real.
00:24:10
Speaker
You know, like I don't want to download any more apps.
00:24:12
Speaker
Like I'm a consumer as well.
00:24:14
Speaker
Right.
00:24:14
Speaker
And so like, unless it's super critical, I just really don't want to download it.
00:24:18
Speaker
I don't think that there's a lot of great solutions out there for parenting.
00:24:21
Speaker
I think that's part of the reason why it's hard is because there's not a lot of great things out there.
00:24:26
Speaker
Right.
00:24:26
Speaker
Like the idea of downloading another camera roll app.
00:24:28
Speaker
I'm like, I don't need this.
00:24:30
Speaker
I have Apple photos.
00:24:31
Speaker
I don't need another email client.
00:24:33
Speaker
I don't need another messaging client.
00:24:35
Speaker
I have great products that satisfy those needs.
00:24:39
Speaker
Most people are trying to cobblestone together what's out there, right?
00:24:43
Speaker
It's like, I'm going to use Google Calendar and like this and this and this and this and this.
00:24:48
Speaker
And then you got to try to get your partner to participate on all those different things and download all those different apps.
00:24:54
Speaker
So, I mean, you know, I think the way that I think of Maple is that there's actually, again, back to the desirability,
00:24:59
Speaker
most people are struggling at home.
00:25:01
Speaker
Most people are dealing with mental health issues.
00:25:03
Speaker
Most people are dealing with troubles in their marriage.
00:25:05
Speaker
So people are out there looking for solutions to try to ease the burden of like, how am I doing all this by myself?
00:25:14
Speaker
Or how do I find something to get me more help at home?
00:25:16
Speaker
So we're in a kind of a benefit spot that I'm guessing that if most of the people who are listening to this are a parent in some capacity and maintaining a job in some capacity, they are probably feeling the same thing that any parent is feeling, which is like,
00:25:28
Speaker
not just app fatigue, but life fatigue.
00:25:31
Speaker
We are the first, probably the first generation of parents to deal with parental burnout.
00:25:35
Speaker
Like that's not an uncommon thing for people to talk about, about like the suffocation and expectations of their, of their work, their career match with the unprecedented expectation of
00:25:47
Speaker
making sure that your kid eats better than any generation ever ate, being in 27 different extracurricular activities.
00:25:54
Speaker
Are your kids safe Monday through Friday, you know, outside because of all this going on in society, like dealing with post COVID life, like everything that's going on, we're a generation of parent that is more fatigued than ever.
00:26:04
Speaker
Right.
00:26:05
Speaker
So I think the way that we overcome it is simply like, we're the solution that most people are actually looking for to meet your problem or desire that they're facing.
00:26:12
Speaker
And
00:26:12
Speaker
As it relates to just like behavioral changes, that's the actual issue, right?
00:26:16
Speaker
Because you have to want to take that step to accept that technology can make your life easier.
00:26:21
Speaker
Most people have a hard time specific with parenting around that.
00:26:24
Speaker
And the second thing which made this company incredibly hard to build, and you may appreciate this in a post-medulal career in life, is that most people are very adamant that when it comes to parenting, their way is the right way.
00:26:37
Speaker
And so it's pretty difficult to build tools for parents when they have a very specific way in their mind that they think things should be done.
00:26:45
Speaker
And that's been much harder to get in terms of getting it right, of creating the right level of flexibility with the right level of constraint.
00:26:52
Speaker
So there's just not like some messy wild west of a product.
00:26:56
Speaker
But, you know, I don't think that we're in the same camp in terms of like, oh, my God, I don't want it.
00:26:59
Speaker
Like the problem with the preschooling system is that there's like there is 20 different apps out there for different schools and different camps and different sports programs.
00:27:07
Speaker
And you're like, I got to do another parent square versus the sports ones that my kids use versus like all these things.
00:27:15
Speaker
And it's like simply to get an
00:27:17
Speaker
a messaging update from their teacher that school is canceled on Monday.
00:27:21
Speaker
It's like, send me an email.
00:27:23
Speaker
I don't need to download an app for you to send me a message that my kid's school is canceled on Monday.
00:27:27
Speaker
Right.
00:27:28
Speaker
But when you're actually using a product to manage your entire household, to do your shopping list, to do your meal planning, to manage your bills and expenses, to plan your trips, to manage your household calendar, to integrate your work calendar, like when all that stuff becomes centralized, there's a very different use case because there's really nothing like Maple out there.
Maple's Growth and User Feedback
00:27:47
Speaker
I feel like there's the future is a push notification from the schools that like goes to your maple.
00:27:53
Speaker
And it probably will be though.
00:27:54
Speaker
Like that's probably the world that we're going to get to because that's the, that's the world we're trying to envision, right?
00:27:59
Speaker
You would start a kids folder in maple and there might be a parent square integration or one of these other companies that are trying to satisfy that.
00:28:06
Speaker
And it's just like an inbox of messages that just sit inside of maple and you don't have to carry a whole nother app.
00:28:11
Speaker
Right.
00:28:11
Speaker
Yeah, that's very cool.
00:28:14
Speaker
I always devote a little bit of time to growth.
00:28:16
Speaker
So you developed a solution.
00:28:19
Speaker
How did you find success in getting that in front of more and more users?
00:28:25
Speaker
Well, my background historically where I had a lot of success was in marketing technology.
00:28:30
Speaker
So Kit was a marketing technology product.
00:28:32
Speaker
So I mean, I'm kind of fortunate to the extent that I know Facebook and Instagram and Google and Apple ads pretty well.
00:28:40
Speaker
I mean, I would say on the app, there was a time probably
00:28:44
Speaker
Not anymore, but there was a time where from a Facebook and Instagram side, I was probably one of the more knowledgeable people on earth as it related to how to build Facebook and Instagram.
00:28:53
Speaker
When I was at Shopify, yeah, we were the largest, largest buyer of small business media ads on the planet.
00:28:59
Speaker
So like I had a lot of kind of competitive advantage there.
00:29:03
Speaker
And most of our growth has been by way of paid advertising on Instagram.
00:29:08
Speaker
And then there's a second tier between Google, Facebook and Apple.
00:29:11
Speaker
But, you know, we're always kind of exploring, like, how do we get moms to talk about us?
00:29:17
Speaker
That's been actually quite hard for us.
00:29:19
Speaker
how do we look at influencer audiences and how do like, we're constantly exploring new ways of trying to drive growth and awareness.
00:29:26
Speaker
Because I think that the biggest misstep in today's world is if you build it, they will come, they're never just going to come.
00:29:33
Speaker
Right.
00:29:33
Speaker
It's like, that's just not happening.
00:29:35
Speaker
And so, you know, we're very, we have a really kind of like robust group of people at Maple who like look at top of the funnel, look at mid funnel,
00:29:45
Speaker
And we're constantly trying to grow our initiatives and add to that team to just really make us more successful on driving usage and new users.
00:29:54
Speaker
Cool.
00:29:55
Speaker
Well, on that note, how do I get started?
00:29:57
Speaker
You know, I want to download the app.
00:29:58
Speaker
What's what am I going to be paying?
00:30:00
Speaker
What's the best way to onboard myself?
Exploring Maple's Free and Premium Features
00:30:02
Speaker
So what's super cool is that I would say 90.
00:30:07
Speaker
ish percent of Maple's features are free.
00:30:09
Speaker
So like most of our users use the free version.
00:30:12
Speaker
We have a free version in Apple's app store and Google play.
00:30:16
Speaker
We have a four star review on both of those platforms and a lot of the bad reviews were from, you know, we're an older product now.
00:30:24
Speaker
So in the early days, we just were not a great product and we got beaten up.
00:30:27
Speaker
But most of our reviews recently are all five star.
00:30:29
Speaker
We've been recommended by the Wall Street Journal.
00:30:31
Speaker
We've been featured as Apple's app of the day.
00:30:34
Speaker
You can download the app.
00:30:35
Speaker
You get started completely for free and in like under 30 seconds if you want to log in with your Apple ID or your Google account.
00:30:42
Speaker
The free version does have ads in it, which we call sponsors because we work with brands, leading brands to defer the cost of Maple.
00:30:52
Speaker
So it keeps the app free for the people who want to use it.
00:30:56
Speaker
If you pay the premium price for Maple, which is $7.99 a month for Maple Plus, you're able to get an ad-free version plus some premium tools and integrations.
00:31:10
Speaker
So...
00:31:11
Speaker
Most people are happy with the free product, but the Plus product is super awesome and also more than happy to give some promo codes out so people can try the Plus version for free for 60 days.
00:31:21
Speaker
Oh, great, Gris.
00:31:22
Speaker
So maybe I'll get some of those from you and put them in the show notes for our audience.
00:31:25
Speaker
There you go.
00:31:26
Speaker
There you go.
00:31:27
Speaker
Great.
00:31:27
Speaker
So let's conclude with this question of how we can help you and uplift you.
00:31:31
Speaker
So you've mentioned several things.
00:31:32
Speaker
I mean, you've mentioned...
00:31:34
Speaker
brands who sponsor you.
00:31:35
Speaker
You just hired someone.
00:31:37
Speaker
So you're growing your team.
00:31:39
Speaker
You also work with integrations.
00:31:42
Speaker
So as you think of the listeners out there, who are you looking to collaborate with or add to your efforts right now?
00:31:48
Speaker
And how can we help you?
00:31:49
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, definitely,
00:31:53
Speaker
from a collaboration perspective, any business that's focused on what I would like to call family wellness, like if you're building, whether it's service layers or actual technology or resource material, anything that you're doing that's investing in trying to make life easier for parents, like we definitely want to team up.
00:32:13
Speaker
You can either integrate into the app and build into the app.
00:32:15
Speaker
We're going to start making our APIs publicly accessible, but still privately accessible.
00:32:20
Speaker
We do a lot with blog content and LinkedIn live events for people who are just more like domain knowledge.
00:32:27
Speaker
So always excited to team up on that.
00:32:29
Speaker
And then if anyone's interested in becoming a Maple sponsor, would love obviously to team up on that.
00:32:36
Speaker
That would be obviously number one.
00:32:38
Speaker
Number two is always we're looking for users.
00:32:40
Speaker
Download the app.
00:32:41
Speaker
Give us the honest feedback.
00:32:42
Speaker
Feel free to email me, michael at growmaple.com.
00:32:45
Speaker
I'd love to hear what you hate, what you love, what we can do to be better.
00:32:49
Speaker
And then I would say kind of like, lastly, just like, I think it is, you know, a very special time right now for people who are
00:33:01
Speaker
in the early innings of household and family wellness.
00:33:06
Speaker
And just like if I can be an ally to anybody, like I'm always really keen to work with great people who are mission oriented and just please seek me out.
00:33:15
Speaker
I'm just trying to build my network like everybody else with people who are daring to change old legacy systems.
00:33:21
Speaker
That's awesome.
00:33:22
Speaker
Well, thank you so much.
00:33:23
Speaker
I'll make sure to include your information and how people can get started in our show notes.
00:33:29
Speaker
And it's been a treat to hear about your business journey.
00:33:32
Speaker
So thanks for being here.
00:33:33
Speaker
Yeah, thank you so much.
00:33:34
Speaker
It's been awesome.
00:33:35
Speaker
Thank you for having me.
Episode Wrap-up and Listener Engagement
00:33:36
Speaker
A note for listeners, Michael and team did kindly follow up with a promo code for those of you who'd like to try the pro version of their app for free for 60 days.
00:33:44
Speaker
So first you need the Maple app.
00:33:45
Speaker
You can find it in the app store or Google Play, or you can go to growmaple.com, scan their QR code to get that app on your device.
00:33:53
Speaker
Once you're inside the app, you want to tap upgrade in the upper right hand corner and follow the link to redeem a code at the bottom of the screen.
00:33:59
Speaker
That code we have for you is maple plus 60.
00:34:03
Speaker
That's maple plus six zero available while supplies last.
00:34:07
Speaker
So give it a try.
00:34:08
Speaker
And thank you for joining us on Parent Tech Allies brought to you by Nestle.
00:34:12
Speaker
Take the parenting quiz at nestle.com and get matched with the expert company, nonprofit or resource that you could use most right now in your parenting journey.
00:34:21
Speaker
It's free.
00:34:22
Speaker
So give it a try at nestle.com.
00:34:24
Speaker
And thank you so much for listening.