Startup Day 703: MVP live...

It's official, you can visit app.empoweredtogether.us to see what we've been building! It's been a long journey to get here though this is really just the beginning. Yesterday, I reflected on why I'm doing this (watch here). I want to dive a bit deeper around the concept of creating the future I want to live in with my kids.

I'm building a marketplace to connect families affected by disability with recommended businesses. I hypothesize that this will increase the rate of excellent customer experiences for People with Disabilities (PwD) -- 80% of their customer experiences are currently FAILURES! I also hypothesize that businesses will see the value in welcome PwD and society will slowly become more inclusive and accessible. Big dreams, I know, but that's the future I'm creating.

On the personal side, creating that future would be meaningless to me if my kids and I didn't get to enjoy it together. That means it's equally important for me to engage in parenting, both so that my kids turn into adults that appreciate inclusion AND so that my kids and I remain close as they age. Yesterday it hit me that building the marketplace is one side of the equation. Parenting well is the other side.

Startup Day 676: MVP coming soon

Hunkering down and revisiting user data consumed much of my last hundred-odd days, resulting in a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). Simply built using Softr and Airtable (with tons of gratitude for INVANTI's support), I'm testing the willingness of Disability Self-advocates and Caregivers to find and write reviews of providers they recommend.

Of the 200+ pain points expressed by Empowered Together's community, 88% can be addressed by the online marketplace simulated in our MVP. Users get to recommend respite providers, social activities, and therapists they love. We're testing a shift from Word of Mouth recommendations to tech-enabled referrals and lead gen, leveraging the collective voice and purchasing power of the disability community.

This progress energizes me as a founder. This could be the key to unlock support for families affected by disability. My narrative for a startup bootcamp's application summarizes it best:

As Empowered Together’s founder, Sarah has a vision and the perseverance to get there. She’s solving the problem she experiences every single day, trying to find providers for her daughter. She’s got personal skin in the game to see the disability community access Empowered Together’s services at scale. Her vision of equity for people with disabilities motivates her to leverage this market-based solution to enact systemic change.

Startup Day 563 -- Recap and Respite

First some updates on recent posts:

1. Winter break offered a welcome pause in work activity. The kids and I made lists of activities we planned to mentally put aside during the break. I wrote down agonizing over product-market fit; they wrote down fighting with their sibling. Their favorite part was burning up their lists afterwards to symbolically set aside what we wrote down. 😁
2. Empowered Together's enterprise pilot with LOGAN concluded and we left the door open for future conversation. The pilot showed both LOGAN and Empowered Together that engaging parents in community is difficult, that immediate kids' needs drive parents' behavior, and that parents are willing to ask for help to meet those needs. 
3. With those lessons in mind, I piloted a December Accelerator with parents to test whether an accelerator model helps users move forward on their parenting journeys. I was also curious if participating as a cohort would impact their momentum. The emotional support offered between parents during that 3-week sprint blew me away. I've learned a lot about what pain points are addressable, though the low uptake of the accelerator's Assess-Plan-Implement model leaves me still wrestling with product-market fit.

Respite showed up as a need during the December Accelerator and during customer discovery conversations in Oct/Nov. If you haven't heard of it applied in this context, respite refers to professional caregiving for an individual with a disability; when respite is in place, parents have non-caregiving time to devote to other areas of their lives. Respite providers come with specialized skills to meet the needs of the individual with a disability. Unsurprisingly, respite is a hard nut to crack so it's no wonder it remains a pain point. January is a relatively quiet month -- a good time to hunker down, revisiting user data around respite and other trends I want to test further. My focus remains identifying what parents would hire Empowered Together to do then testing the traction of that product/service with a broader audience before piloting it.