People sometimes ask Jennifer Nadelson if the startup she co-founded last year, aimed at offering working parents a wider range of kids activities, was “just a Covid thing.” Her answer? Definitely not.
“This is a working parent problem,” says the Brookline mom and CEO of Scout. “This is a phenomenon we’ve got to focus on... This is a foundational structure that already put working parents — and in particular, working women — under a tremendous amount of stress.”
The timing of the company, however, coincided perfectly with the sudden attention on childcare brought about by the pandemic. The Scout app was first launched in April 2020, just weeks after the shutdown of schools and workplaces forced many working parents to juggle childcare and remote work. Nadelson says the timing had been planned for months — the plan was always to offer parents a mix of in-person and virtual activities tailored to their kids at the times when parents most needed them.
But in August, Scout relaunched the app after a pivot away from the consumer market. This time, the focus was on businesses looking to offer helpful benefits to their employees as the realization set in that the struggle of working parents wasn't just a Covid phenomenon.
Today, the company offers information for 28,000 activities — a mix of virtual and in-person, as well as both one-time and ongoing programs. The activities are easily filtered by geography as well as what days and times they are needed.
So far, Scout has three large corporate clients, two of them Fortune 500 companies, said Nadelson, and has gotten $260,000 in funding, a combination of bootstrapping, friends and family money and angel investment. It is now looking for a followup seed round of more than $1 million to further scale up the company.
The three founders are all moms who met years ago through their kids. They also have extensive experience in technology and marketing roles. Nadelson was formerly executive director of the nonprofit, Primary Care Progress, as well as director of operations at Ariadne Labs, Atul Gawande’s research think tank. Tara Grey Ventura, now Scout’s head of product, has more than two decades of experience in software industry roles, while Julie Einstein Stuecken, chief marketing officer, is a longtime product-marketing strategist who launched and grew retail products at companies including Adidas, Levi’s, Pulte, Reebok, Teva, and M.Gemi.
The three have also dealt first-hand with the hurdles familiar to working parents: Ventura and Stuecken both have children in the 6-18 age group at which the app is aimed, and while Nadelson’s kids are in college, she says she remembers all-to-well the struggles she faced when nannies and babysitters had last-minute emergencies, and she and her husband had to scramble to come up with alternate plans.
Nadelson said parents can use the app as a backup plan when childcare falls through, but many use it simply to keep their kids from spending too much time watching YouTube or TikTok. The app offers camps, chess, fencing and hundreds of other activities. Nadelson said that even during the pandemic, there have been in-person events — such as at the Hill House in downtown Boston — and she expects more with the coming of spring.
One key difference between Scout and other apps that list kids activities, said Nadelson, is that Scout doesn’t require the activity centers to pay for the listing. As a result, she said Scout’s listings aren’t skewed toward mostly wealthy neighborhoods, and their service doesn’t burden already-struggling childcare providers.
“We like to say that we’re the Switzerland of apps for this… We are agnostic. We only want to find quality solutions that are out there. We don’t monetize it through those activity centers,” said Nadelson. “We feel quite strongly that monetizing from the activity centers right now, they are squeezed so tight… that would just be squeezing them again.”
