Many times I get asked what made me start GoKid.
Four years ago, my husband and I decided it was time to leave New York City. We wanted to raise our kids, as millions before us, in a house in the suburbs. We fell in love with an old farmhouse in Connecticut and moved one hour north of the city.
Having a yard, having access to an excellent school system, and getting a break from the non-stop hassle of the city were all things we loved. We soon discovered that there was a problem we had overlooked. While our school district provided busses to school, on many occasions the girls had to be there earlier for orchestra or choir practices or needed to be picked up later. Plus, they suddenly picked up many sports and after-school activities that required driving.
Being full-time working parents, often commuting to the city, my husband and I didn’t have the time to do all these drives. I reached out to neighbors to coordinate drives, but managing these carpools was tricky as it involved many text messages going back and forth and sometimes even spreadsheets. Another problem was that for the seasonal sports and choir practices at school I didn’t even know who to carpool with.
Having worked in technology and innovation for the past 15 years, I knew that the technology was there. But no one had applied it to carpooling parents.
I became obsessed with fixing the problem. I hired two engineers and a design company, and we started building a prototype (or MVP).
After almost 12 grueling months of work and testing with friends and neighbors, we knew it could work. When we got accepted into Techstars Mobility in 2016 I decided to quit my day job and work on GoKid full-time.
During the time commuting to Detroit, we discovered that the problem was bigger than anticipated. There are 32 million kids in the US alone that are being driven to school every single day and more than 50% of all schools in the US don’t have transportation. We’ve received requests from Mexico, Australia, and California to use our solution to help towns and school districts.
Fast forward to the fall of 2017. What started as a fixed idea has grown to a company with 10 full-time team members on three continents. We also work with several freelancers, some of them parents themselves, who are passionate about helping us succeed.
We are still at the beginning of a long journey. But with users in 25 countries and 120,000 carpool trips scheduled using our app, our technology and company have matured enough to tackle additional challenges. Eight weeks ago we released GoKid Connect, a technology that helps schools, teams, and communities to identify parents who live close by and who are interested in carpooling. We are developing our technology for in-car use and we are talking to many technology partners that are helping families to lead an easier life.
