Childcare platforms struggle with tight margins between parent budgets and caregiver wages
Avni Patel Thompson · What Shutting Down Your Startup Feels Like - Avni Patel Thompson of Poppy with Kat Manalac · Y Combinator · Jan 30, 2019 · at 2:17
Avni Patel Thompson, founder and CEO of the childcare startup Poppy, discusses why building a venture-scale childcare marketplace is structurally difficult.
0:00 / 0:22exact quote · 22.3s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“If you know the category that I'm working within is child care it's already an inherently margin-challenged kind of category. So what I mean by that is, like, what parents are willing and able to pay for this kind of work, and then what caregivers need to make, the ones that are, like, highly skilled and everything like that. So, And then can you make some kind of margin in between as a company that then facilitates this stuff?”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Avni Patel Thompson
Patel Thompson rejected pivoting Poppy into a profitable, high-priced boutique agency
“There was also an option to say, let's just make this a nice high-end tech-enabled agency, and folks were like, why didn't you just raise prices and do all that? I could have, I hundred percent could have, and turned it into a nice kind of like side business o…”
Unfiltered financial transparency creates pointless anxiety for junior startup staff
“What I soon realized as we started to grow towards eight, 10 people is that I can talk about these super ambiguous things, but I also have the power to do something about it. For more junior folks, you have to be, you know, what's the kinder thing, because you…”
Patel Thompson argues Poppy was not a failure despite lacking venture scale
“I think you could take a look and say Poppy was a failure. I think in some lenses, like that's the narrative, but I sort of pushed back on that because I don't think Poppy was a failure. Poppy set out to do and did the thing. Especially for thousands of parent…”
Thompson: Curiosity and frustration are better motivators than passion
“The tricky thing about passion is that it can make you confident. It can make you feel like you know the answer. But with curiosity, it keeps you humble and it keeps you asking the questions. And frustration just gives you the motivation to get going.”
Thompson: Innovative startups have no experts aside from users
“You're trying to do something that's never been done before. There are no experts. The only way you can do this is by talking to your users, and then iterating your way forward, inching forward.”
Thompson: Never give early products to friends and family for free
“This is also why I don't believe in friends and family discounts. And it's not to say that you don't maybe give them discounts or things like that, but just don't give it to them for free, right? Because that won't give you the right signal for where, whether …”