This content was created by Max Brun. This content was uploaded by Max Brun. This is a YouTube video titled "How Winnie Pivoted Into Being A Childcare Marketplace" (created 2024-05-01). The excerpt is a recorded discussion between two speakers (an interviewer, SPEAKER A, and a founder/co‑founder, SPEAKER B) describing the startup’s iterative pivots and the journey to product–market fit. SPEAKER B recounts how their original free social app struggled, how a weekend project — building a crude San Francisco daycare/preschool directory (initiated by co‑founder Anne) — unexpectedly resonated with parents, led to expanded statewide listings, generated SEO traffic, and ultimately became the core product and basis for the childcare marketplace.
Chapters
So you mentioned as far as, you know, the pivot and, you know, one of the things that we don't talk about a lot is, you know, you know, the journey to kind of finding product market fit. And sometimes, you know, not only just one pivot, but sometimes multiple along the way. So could you kind of like walk us through, you know, what maybe what that experience was like and what some of those kind of insights that led to kind of finding product market fit were?
Yeah, I wish I could say like, you know, we just knew we didn't have product market fit and then we had this aha moment and we figured it out. But it was more like, We were sort of irrationally, you know, believed in our original idea to the point of like trying to force it to have product market fit. We did a lot of like these kind of growth hacks where we would get users and we'd be like, look, it's growing. People really like this app to find places and things to do with your kids. But the truth is like it wasn't making money. It wasn't growing fast enough to be like, A free social app. And so it was just in this kind of like dead zone where companies go to die. And it was very gradual where we started seeing the data of parents using our app to try to search for childcare. And then it was actually a weekend that my co-founder Anne decided to look at the California state childcare licensing database and then pull in every daycare and preschool in San Francisco where we lived, um, and just build a website that like listed them all. So it was a really crappy website. It was just San Francisco and she built it in a weekend and then she like put it in a mother's group. And I was like, Anne, like, why are you doing this? This is dumb. And she's like, oh, it's another one of these growth hacks. We'll get people to use this and then they'll download our app and they'll love All the other things we do. But it turns out that was, that was the thing. It wasn't a growth hack, it was the whole product. And we kind of saw really quickly after we shared it in that mother's group that like it was— we had been sharing in that same mother's group like all the things we were building and our posts would always get ignored or like blocked. This is the first time like people were commenting and they were like, oh, thanks so much. Like, I have my own spreadsheet of daycares, like, check this one out and look at all the info I collected. And we were like, oh, I think we're onto something here, kind of hit a nerve. And so we, you know, then did it for the rest of California, which was pretty easy after we did San Francisco. And we started to see not only were people using our website with all the daycares and preschools, but we started getting some SEO traffic, which is now a major part of our business. And so we were like, okay, there's— This is kind of a sort of product market fit we hadn't felt with our other thing. And I kind of like describe it as like, you don't know, like, when you don't have product market fit necessarily, but when you have it, you kind of are like, oh, this is it. That other thing was not it. This is it.
