In a conversational interview, Sam Parr and a guest explore the untapped potential of employing stay‑at‑home moms, arguing that solving the flexibility problem for this demographic could generate billions. They use UserTesting as a concrete case study: the platform pays everyday people $10 per usability test (companies pay $25‑$30), aggregates video recordings of users navigating websites, and sells the insights to product teams. The guest recounts his mother’s experience—starting as a tester, moving into quality‑control, learning corporate tools like Slack and Jira, and eventually receiving low‑strike‑price stock that netted her $150,000 after the company’s IPO. The discussion expands to other under‑served groups—military spouses (via the startup Squared Away), ex‑cons, and teenagers—highlighting how hiring these populations can be both socially impactful and financially lucrative. They also touch on operational considerations: setting clear expectations, matching workforce demographics to task requirements, and fostering a culture of shared purpose.
Chapters
I've been saying this for a long time, which is anybody who could figure out how to employ the stay-at-home mom workforce is gonna make billions of dollars. So if you just work backwards from, there's a bunch of moms who are at home, they wanna earn a little extra income, doesn't have to be a ton. They want to maintain flexibility of being able to stay at home and work, not like necessarily a fixed number of full-time hours or the same hours every day. Who can solve that problem? And, um, there's only one example that I know of that's solving that problem. I don't know if you know any.
For moms. Yeah, maybe uservoice.com. I think they do it.
User testing.
User testing.
That's the one I was thinking of.
Oh, is it really?
My mom worked for them. Yeah, so—
oh my god, that's so funny.
I knew about it.
What a random thing that we both knew that. So I would say— so usertesting.com is an amazing company, by the way. So you just pay someone to like go through your website.
Public, by the way. How cool is this? They just went public, and my mom's stock— and my mom was like, well, say what it is. So User Testing, basically it's a service where I have an app or a website, I want to know where it's confusing for users. Like, design makes sense to me, but like, sure enough, when somebody else is using it, they're confused, they can't find the thing they want, and they just record your mom like scrolling through the site. So they have an army of testers, which is just all the requirement is be a normal person. You have— we do not even want you to be highly skilled. Like, you're supposed to represent the average customer. So they have a bunch of people, they send them a little camera that, um, that records their finger on their phone, basically records them. Like, and they just talk out loud. So you give a task, you say like, you know, find a Christmas gift for your dad and put it into your cart. And they're like, okay, I'm looking for the gifts for dad section. I don't see it. Uh, scrolling, scrolling, scrolling. They don't see the button that says menu. Oh, there's the menu. Uh, dad, dad. Oh, it's men's, men's. Okay. I'll click men's. Um, Yeah, I don't get how this is sorted. Oh, this is by new release. And you just talk through what's confusing to you, and that 15-minute video goes to the company, and the company gets to watch it, and they get to share it internally. Their, their researcher basically shares it with the designer, the engineer.
They pay like $300 for it, right?
No, no, each test is like $25 or $30. And then, um, and then now it's all switched to subscription, but originally it was like $25, $30 a test. The tester gets $10 for doing the test. And the company kept, you know, $15, $20. And so the tester's like, cool, I could do like 4 of these in an hour. And so like a bid would come online, oh, Chipotle wants you to test their new mobile menu. And you would just have to go quickly say yes. And then you qualify. They're looking for women, you know, age 40 to 55 in the US. And you're like, yeah, great. I qualify. I can take this test.
And that's a billion-dollar company now. Its market cap is over a billion dollars. Did your mom get paid? Did they give her shares?
Yeah, it's awesome. So basically my mom was— she first started off as a tester. Then she got hired by the company to review the other testers because you have to do quality control. So she became like— she would watch the test and give feedback to the testers. I'm like, hey, your audio sucks, or like, you're mumbling, or like, you didn't follow the instructions of the test. Um, one more strike and you're out of the testing pool. And so that was her job. And she was the oldest person in the company, I think. So she was like— my mom's like 63 now, so she just retired this year. So she was there at 62 years old. My mom like had Slack and like knew how to use all like Jira. She knew what a Jira ticket was. Like, it was crazy. My mom, like, who knew? And she got some shares and she had always told me like, should I? I was like, yeah, you want the shares for sure. And then she would tell me like, hey, the CEO did an all hands. He said this, this, this. Is that good? I'm like, yeah, it sounds good. Like this company's doing well. I should have bought secondary stock in the company during that time because I had like basically inside info of like, this company is pretty good. There's a good quality company. and I was a user of the service as well. So it goes public the other day, like, like 2 weeks ago, and I'm like, Mom, how many shares do you have? And she goes, looks in Carta, she tells me your share. I'm like, Mom, you made $150,000.
No way.
And she's like, yeah, because her strike price was super low. Uh, she was there for like 4 or 5 years. And, uh, so I was like, that's amazing. That's like, uh, like, that's— that my mom was so happy. Yeah, like, good for her. That's badass money.
And so like This is why I think this model of who do you want to employ is actually interesting because it's actually there. It's two for two reasons. It's motivating. So like the fact that like they are employing, uh, most like, I have no idea. I'm just gonna make this up. If it's like mostly women who stayed at home for a long time and now they want to get back to it, that's like incredibly motivating. It's like, look, we're serving our employees. Yeah. It's very noble. It's cool. Let's say you want to hire, uh, uh, ex-cons or something. It's like, look, this is interesting. Or we're going to hire a bunch of 16-year-olds and it's gonna be their first job. We're going to train them how to be men and women and prepare them for the rest of their lives. It's actually incredibly cool. It's fascinating.
There's one— I want to look up the name, give them a shout-out here. So it's hire— you hire military wives as EAs.
That's awesome.
It's called—
and it also helps with expectations, so you know what you're— you know, what's it called?
Squared Away.
Squared Away.
That's basically a woman. I think, I think her story is that she I'm assuming she was in this position. I don't really know. Um, but basically it's military spouses. Um, and I was like, this is a great, this is a great idea. Um, because you know, this is US, uh, these are US employees. They want this work. They, um, you know, they, it's great to provide for their family while the husband's away. I just think it's awesome.
And, um, and it, it helps significantly with expectations because then user testing knows, all right, we're mostly going to be hiring 60-year-old or 50-year-old women who don't have probably a ton of experience with Slack and Jira. So now we know what we're getting into, right?
Or processes. We know how to hire. The culture is good. They all get along. Yeah, it's like, like-mindedness.
Or if we're hiring a ton of 17-year-old high school kids, like, we know, like, here's the deficiencies and here's where they kick ass. Or if we're hiring guys out of jail, we know, like, here's where they're going to struggle, here's where not to struggle. So that's cool.
