The Founding Story & First Steps For Starting HopSkipDrive

8 Sept 2024 · 1 min

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HopSkipDrive started ten years ago when three mothers needed a safe way to get their kids to school and activities. The pandemic nearly killed the business, but the founder pivoted to selling to schools instead of parents. School transportation is a $30 billion fragmented market, and that B2B shift has been their focus for the past four years.

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So what was the founding story for HopSkipDrive and what were the first steps that you took to start it as a marketplace at the time?
Yeah, so we started HopSkipDrive about 10 years ago. And, you know, I'll tell the story. We're really kind of a 4-year-old company that's really a 10-year-old company. But we started the company about 10 years ago and really, you know, as a busy parent myself, really struggling with getting my kids where they needed to go as a full-time working mom, Was, was, you know, really struggling with that, figured there had to be a better way. And so there's 3 of us that started the company. We're all moms. We have 8 kids between us, and we built Hop, Skip, Drive to solve that problem and to create a trusted, safe marketplace that we as parents would feel comfortable using to get our kids to school and after-school activities. So it really started as a consumer business. What you will, you know, as I tell the story, there were some twists and turns along the way, namely COVID, which nearly killed the business. And coming out of that really took it to, you know, we, we realized this was a huge problem for parents, but along the way we realized this was an even bigger problem for school transportation, which is a $30 billion industry and is very broken. And so really morphed the marketplace from a B2C marketplace to a B2B marketplace. And, and that has been what we've been doing for the last 4 years coming out of COVID.