This is a transcription of a November 18, 2019 interview with GoKid Founder Stefanie Lemcke by Fred Fishkin of Techstination. Listen to the podcast here.
Fred Fishkin: Welcome to the Techstination. Joining us is Stefanie Lemcke, the founder, and CEO of GoKid. Thank you for joining us, Stefanie.
Stefanie Lemcke: Thank you so much for having me. I\’m really excited to be here.
Fred: Tell us what GoKid is. What\’s it all about?
Stefanie: Sure. I started the company really out on my own– solving my own problem.
I\’m a mother of two kids we left New York City and moved to the suburbs and suddenly I found myself constantly in need of drives for my kids to school and the after-school activities. The problem was I still had a job in the city, so I couldn’t be in two places all the time.
That\’s when I started to reach out to other parents and asked if we could create carpools and just help each other. And I found it really hard to organize these rides. There were a lot of text messages going back and forth, and in the middle of a meeting, someone would call me and say, “Could you pick up?”
And I said, because I’ve worked in technology and innovation for many years, I thought there must be a different way to do this in the age of Uber and Lyft. I knew the technologies were there, but I wondered why had no one done this for parents and put the technology together that would help us set up and manage carpools.
So after a lot of thinking, I decided, “Someone needs to fix this,” and I started GoKid. And what GoKid does is, you download the app from the app store and it helps us manage and schedule rides for our children. So it’s not an Uber for kids, it’s still the parents driving. But we set up a ride by simply inviting other parents. We tell the app where our child is coming from and going to and what times we need the ride, and we send out an invitation. When the other parent accepts the invitation, that’s where our magic kicks in. We schedule everything. We tell the parents when it’s time to go when they’re driving. If a driver is missing for the day, we send out an alert to all the parents and we do the mapping and routing for the trips. So the parent who’s driving knows who to pick up when and where.
Fred: It sounds wild, It sounds like an Uber or Lyft, a kind of app in a sense, but this is obviously a different scenario.
Stefanie: Yes. So the technology works like Uber and Lyft, but parents plan ahead, so they know that their kids have to be at school at 7:30 every morning. So they will set up all these rides and invite other parents to share the ride. So it’s not driver based. We don’t hire a driver, and there are no additional vehicles on the road, but it’s really the parents taking turns and we’re solving a huge problem. Over half of all schools in the US no longer have buses and over 30 million kids are being driven to school by their parents every single day. And so our mission is to drastically reduce the amount that parents need to drive by just setting up, you know, carpools, with two or three parents. So they only have to drive once or twice a week instead of every single day.
Fred: And that’s not even mentioning all of the after-school activities and weekend activities, whether it’s sports, or dance, or music, or whatever it happens to be.
Stefanie: That’s a great point, and we thought about that a lot too, because, in fact, we see, our app is used a lot for these after-school activities. So we have done another thing, we made it easy for parents to find others who are on the same team, let’s say soccer team for your daughter.
A lot of times you know the time you have to be there, but you don’t know who else is on the team. So we have integrated with leading sports management tools like TeamSnap and SportsEngine, so parents can integrate the account that they use for their child, and then they know who else is on the team. So they can reach out to the parents on the team and all the information flows into GoKid. So, you know the time you need to be there and you just add another parent and then you can share the ride. So that’s addressing the problem that over 32 million kids are in organized sports in the US and there is so much driving associated with that.
Fred: Well as a parent with a background in technology, you had this idea. So how do you go about making it real?
Stefanie: Yeah, that\’s a great question. So while I worked in technology and innovation for many years, I never built an app before. So obviously I needed help. I hired a designer and a first developer when I had the idea, and I funded it. And we basically did a lot of interviews with parents and we had them sit at a table and talk through the scenarios of how they would set up carpools. And we built an MVP (Most Viable Product), it was really just a dummy. And parents played around with that. And we got a lot of feedback.
So this is, um, we incorporated that feedback, and our designer really then went in and designed how the app would work. And we hired another developer and then went into the development phase–which took almost a year because it\’s quite complicated what we built.
And then more and more testing. And over the years– Um, so we’ve been at it over like– shortly three years. We had hundreds of parents send us feedback, and so we are incorporating all that feedback into building the app. And fast forward, we have now half a million rides on the app and we are growing rapidly, which is really, you know, crazy when you think you’ve started a kitchen table and you thought it was just your problem. And it turns out that hundreds of thousands of others had the same problem. It’s pretty fascinating.
Fred: You’re working with schools and such too. So there are two different versions. There’s a free version of the app, and there’s a pro version, which is by subscription. Tell us about that and what the differences are.
Stefanie: Yeah. So the basic version of GoKid when you go to the app store and, you know, the GoKid Carpool is free, so you can set up and manage your carpools for free.
We added a couple of premium features, for example, that you can integrate your entire schedule into your Google calendar. That you can chat within the app. And, we are launching now our live tracking of the vehicle so you know exactly when the car is coming and to get an alert and you get notification when your child has been dropped off at school. That’s a premium feature. And we’re charging $4.99 a month or $49 annually.
We also have a school version of GoKid. Because a lot of times parents are in a school and they simply don’t know who to invite, or who to even carpool with. And who would live close by? So this is actually a version we only launched a year ago, and it’s called GoKid Connect. So GoKid Connect is licensed by the schools and the schools would upload the parent data to our admin board portal. And then invite other parents to join that carpool system. Once the parents accept the invitation, they can find other parents based on vicinity or the grades of their kids. So it really helps make these connections. And once they’ve found a family that they think is a good match, they reach out to them and set up the carpool. And then it connects to our front-end apps. Google, you know, from the Google Play and Apple store.
Fred: And you’ve taken this international.
Stefanie: Yes. So that surprised us probably most, we didn’t really know what we were doing and we released it on the app stores globally and suddenly we have users in 25 other countries. Basically, anyone who speaks English, you know, can follow a couple of guidelines on the app, and can use it, and it surprised us most.
Obviously, the US is still our biggest market. But, we have a lot of users in Canada. The next market is the UK, and Australia and New Zealand are strong. But we have users in Norway and Sweden and we just, it’s, it’s really quite surprising, but, it tells us that it’s a global problem. A third of the morning traffic is caused by parents globally driving their children to school. So, it’s something– what we are really proud of is that we measure impact. We measure how many miles have been saved driving, how many hours have been saved for the parents, and most importantly, how much CO2 has been saved. And we can share that data with the schools, but also we’re starting to work with entire regions. And that really makes us very proud and motivated. It’s very motivational for the entire team.
Fred: You’re saving a lot of parents and kids headaches. And at the same time, you’re helping the environment.
Stefanie: Yeah, that’s pretty– it’s important. I mean, there is so much about, you know, the effects of climate change are being felt all across the US and globally. And the traffic in some cities– we are now in Houston and working with the, with the city there. It’s just insane, and it’s amazing if you can help and, you know, help out the parents and the planet.
Fred: Very interesting. Tell us a little bit about your background, because that is interesting as well. You’ve got a Ph.D. in law.
Stefanie: Yeah. So I started off as a lawyer, actually a media lawyer, and I worked for the Disney Channel. We launched the Disney channel in Europe. I was part of the management team, and so the children’s market was always something that really fascinated me. And later on, I also ran a VOD department for large media companies. So I, you know, I was in the media, but also a bit in technology and innovation.
And then I moved with my family, 14 years ago to the US, and started working with startups out of the New York region and also with large corporates looking at startups. And, when that started, I was like, “Wow, this is so much happening in technology.” And I got more and more fascinated by that.
And then as I said, I ran into my own problem that I needed, you know, something better for setting up and managing carpools. I got so inspired by all the innovation happening that I said “This problem needs to be fixed and I just wanna, you know, take a shot at it.”
Fred: Terrific. And, once again, it’s called GoKid. You can find it on both Google and Apple. Where do you plan to go from here with this? Any thoughts about where you take this? Getting more users?
Stefanie: Yes. Getting more users is absolutely on our roadmap. We really haven’t spent anything on marketing. It’s been, you know, word of mouth so far and now we\’re starting to work with entire regions.
We just got a grant from the state of Michigan and we are deploying our technology to many schools there. We’re working with the city of Houston. We are talking to Chicago and Indianapolis, so this is really something we are really excited about, that cities are discovering traffic management can be done with a solution that’s already existing. And we’re very excited about that.
Fred: Again, it’s called GoKid. It’s Stefanie Lemcke. Thank you for taking the time with us.
Stefanie: Thank you so much for having me.
