Business idea targeting parents/couples: Please RIP it apart

[LemonKangroo]

Context: I feel there are too many apps/services to get into a relationship, but I haven't seen anything to keep marriages together.

Target market: Millennial career mothers with young kids (Because this is by far one of the busiest period of our lives, and we end up playing the default parent role usually).

Some common struggles for the target market (assumptions/generalising):

1. Guilt (Not enough time with kids - we are choosing to be at work and not home - a wicked choice, or the shame for self-care and leaving kids with babysitters/grandparents).
2. Burnout (Balancing Work-Parenting-Household-Relationship-Others) - Only if there was more time - I'd likely sleep/recharge.
3. Lack of support/mental load - Dealing with in-laws, planning dates, money problems, or having to constantly tell our partner to pull their weight (not always of course)
4. Other - Intimacy, lack of control, commitment, or presence in the marriage, etc.

*Apologies if this is harsh/very gender biased - I know not every relationship or partner is like this.

Solution (All-in-one subscription per month):

1. Easy way to share the house and family admin work (chores, reminders, appointments, bill payments, etc.). I know of existing solutions, but I wanted to implement the card system from the Fair Play book & gamify it.
2. Bonding/Me-time (concierge to plan and do logistics - you or a couple just turns up). Hyper-personalised date night/revisit your past.
3. Support (Connection to vetted businesses to solve legal, financial, couple conflicts, career, etc., issues) - There are issues around recognising we need help then selecting a good service on budget is tougher.

Give me every reason why this won't work, why am I wasting my time on this? E.g. the problems are way off, solutions are too weak/generic, etc.

Thanks for sharing

Do you mind expanding on the challenges you have? Is it that you tried communicating the mental load and lack of quality issues with your husband and he didn't listen, accordingly the skepticism comes from, if he won't listen to me, what would an app do?

It's a matter of perspective too, no? It's another thing for you to do if he doesn't. So it's driven by empathy rather than imposing/commanding.

Privacy seems to be very personal in this thread - Some share all the info and others are totally against it.
How do you treat your privacy now with AI, Google, social media,..?

I think it’s trying to do three very different things, all of which I can get elsewhere, mostly for free. The tool for sharing the workload sounds useful but you’ve said these apps already exist.

As others have said, you’re potentially going after three different audiences with one product so marketing will be confusing.

OP you mentioned an initial budget of £1-3k upthread. To get this to a workable testing mode for a robust enough sample of users to be worth the feedback, you’re looking at genuinely hundreds of thousands of pounds for the scope you’ve mentioned.

The idea is too broad, involves too many solutions and is based on the fundamental problem of one lazy / disengaged partner not pulling their weight - something that won’t change with an app, it just won’t.

Men who are like this continue being like this because, bluntly, it works for them. They would rather the relationship ended than do an equal share. Then meet someone else and be lazy again if they can get away with it.

If you want to create an app then you need, initially, one very specific problem and solution. Then you can scale to add others once you’ve tested, learned and got the income from a decent user base to fund expansion.

I really think you need a new idea unfortunately.

I am also more convinced that these solutions are headed to the bin now, and it's time to either go back and figure out the real problem or a different problem altogether.

Reflecting, I haven't nailed the BIG problem that career mums with young kids need solving - Balance seems like a nice to have, not a must have. If you have any thoughts on this, please feel free to share!

I'll respond to help understand the problem, but as of now, the IDEA IS DEAD.

Why are you wanting to start a business? Might there be something closer to your existing expertise?
(I have my own business, but it does exactly what I did when I was last employed. Dull, but profitable.)

Well done OP. Far better to do your research here and accept what will be difficult for you - that your cherished plan is a non-starter - than to realise it a few/many thousands of pounds down the road!

Time to pivot...

They're not solutions.

Great question:

1. Work on something I care about (i.e. more than a paycheck)
2. Be my own boss
3. I really am not cut out for the corporate world (I feel like i am cursed - I was an engineer, strategy consultant) and lead ops at startups but none of them really worked out
4. I feel AI is coming for us, especially white collar, so might as well get ahead of this (very tiny fear) haha

Can definitely try my own consulting business but the hours, clients, and demands are extreme.

How did you go about sourcing your own leads? How do you feel about it compared to being in the corporate world?

I work for a large company where they keep offering us those online counselling services. This seems in the realm of that idea.
i could see it working for people where the DH might not want to talk things though but going to an app would give the issues more of a problem focus and get him
to engage more. To some people using an app means there’s a definite task to work on which attracts them.

marketing would be challenging as with the online work counselling they have a captive audience to push the service to. Id guess the women would be the ones more likely to buy and start the app.
I feel like training a small language model
Miight be expensive. Hyperpersonalization still depends on what options physically exist. In my village there’s a pizza place, a curry place and a kids pub with pool tables and dirty fries, don’t need genAI to give me those three options! So you’re talking an affluent, urban market. I still think it could resonate with those people. Millenial
mums, bankers/lawyers, time poor cash rich, both parties used to ordering others about at work but need an app and a problem solving approach at home. An offshoot of online counselling services. As a PP said it’s a curation/grouping of services . The app suggests X is less obnoxious than “I told ChatGPT about you and here’s what it said “. Good luck!

Not in the traditional sense (detail, crisp,...) but please refer to some of the apps mentioned in this thread, other couple apps (Cupla, Flamme) are doing well (I thought they were gimmicky and could do better) - Tackle real problems like time management, mental load, etc. My solutions suck of course, but all I want to confirm is are these problems real? And how severe?

@LemonKangroo I will admit I am glad you have decided to abandon this idea.
It sounded a massive amount of money for something that seemed a complete waste of time (no offence).
I hope you figure out a good plan B.

The problems are real. You can read mumsnet for an hour an confirm the problems are real. The solutions are not in this particular thread.

Logistics (reservations, baby-sitters, transport, etc.) is taken care of so its frictionless and you can focus that time on getting ready, extra time together, and so on.

This is the bit that struck me as most unworkable. How will the app work out which of our friends or family is available to baby sit? and them ask them?

Our fields are vastly, vastly different as the area I work in is (to be vague) humanitarian and therefore inherently for the greater good however it gets done. Plus the time and demands are lower outside employment whereas the earning potential is higher, so all in all the calculations are very different.
However, two things are likely the same: Expect to need two years to be billing all the time you want to work (even if you take all your clients from contacts from when you were employed) and aim to bring in twice as much as your employed salary to come out with about the same after expenses and sick days, holidays and bank holidays (as these are all unpaid of course) etc.
I am not fussed about point 2, I would much rather have a good manager than be my own boss. Regarding point 3, are there no opportunities outside the corporate world you could consider? Regarding number 4, you are right to some extent but I wouldn’t think that app development as a non-programmer is particularly AI proof either.

Basically app developers will only do EXACTLY what you ask them to. Nothing intuitive, nothing extra, you have to pay out ever single step and plan every single colour, graphic and piece of text for every possible user journey. All they do it code it. And changes are expensive.

So "balance your life" - what does this mean? Different things to different people I am sure and WHY does anyone want to do that?
Balancing your life is a Feature not a Benefit. As a very crude rule of thumb if soemone can say "so what?" to a statement then its a feature

I agree, having worked with Coders/App Devs
They follow instructions that you have mapped out for them precisely, if you can't do this you will need to employ someone for the middle bit to translate your vision to a set of basic workflows to build the app

I have worked in startups and that wasn't my experience.
On the otherhand, at least for MVP - I can use vibecoding tools to build something very basic. So I don't imagine it would cost in 100k's to test it.
Yeah, all the AI stuff won't be there, but as a startup, you'd do a lot of this manually in the background - That's how it works until you have sufficient revenue to start automating.

I do believe, I haven't dug deep into the problems to find the most severe, must solve problem.

From conversations, it was mental load (overwhelm), burnout, guilt and loneliness - What I figured was the underlying theme here is the need to balance life so the BENEFIT is better feelings and more time to do the things you want (me-time, work, time with kids, partners etc.). i.e Balance is the need to achieve these benefits.

What are your thoughts? Particularly on the underlying theme

I can say so what to "just do it", or "belong anywhere"..so i am not sure if I fully understand this.

It allows you to balance your life - so what?
It allows you more time to focus on the things that are important to you and spend less time doing the necessary tasks you don't enjoy
Just a crude example.

You really need to be very very clear on what problem you are solving and if this is indeed a problem for enough people to make it viable.
You also need to look at how you would monetise the app and what the break even figures etc are. If you can't make money at it then its a hobby

People would be more likely to be motivated to do this kind of stuff earlier in their relationship, whilst they're still flush with hope and love and excitement but before drudge has set in. So it's a pre-emptive strike. Setting them up for success just before they buy their first home perhaps. So you could create something and partner with mortgage companies for first time buyers, estate agents or a different version pre-baby and partner with maternity units or nappy brands. That kind of thing anyway.

I'm also not clear on your motivation. Have you been through a divorce or had a relationship unravel? Or seen your mum burdened by all the wife work? Why this particular area? I'm not saying you have to answer the questions on here but are you in this kind of field anyway or is this just a random idea?

have you vibe coded to a mvp before? Vibe coding is all the rage, but it’s a clunky process and you often need to have a base line understanding of coding to understand why the mashed ai code isn’t working and to be able to direct it with the understanding of why its currently not working or do it yourself.

Were the developers at your start ups working for the startups or outsourced freelance? Freelance will as @HangingOver says do the exact thing you tell them and not much else.

i feel you’re going to plow on with this idea, so i wish you all the success, but strongly strongly urge you not to put more into this than you can afford to lose, it will be a very costly process for what you’re asking, regardless of vibe coding beginnings and don’t throw more money at it then you can afford too.

I have and learning more about it daily. Using Lovable (+Supabase + N8N) and replit primarily. I have done basic coding projects so its not completely foreign, but nowhere near app development.

I have worked with them within startups, never outsourced.

Nope, it's dead! However, I am going to continue exploring the problem (will also ditch it if there is no promise). Primarily focus on consolidation, severity, priority & viability. It's basically what @Hoppinggreen mentioned.

• However, outside of this forum and my personal network, I am unsure how to effectively conduct further discovery. So any thoughts on this would be super helpful!

Another lesson I have learnt here is that the solutions were just crap in terms of lack of coherence, broad (as you rightly pointed out), generic, solving different problems, etc. Hence, I'll focus on just 1 problem and 1 feasible solution.

Thanks for your patience with me on this one! Letting go was harder than I imagined.

Outsourced freelance development vs in house employed, are very very different work styles and hangovers description is pretty much spot on for how it works with freelancers. It can get incredibly expensive very quick when doing changes.