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Meerkat: Meet Parent Friends

Meerkat is the app designed to connect you with other parents who are looking for the same thing as you: a strong support community to raise your family in.

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Meerkat Profile Screen
Meerkat Prompt Screen
Meerkat Parent Match Screen
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Origin Story (Why I built it)

A few months into the pandemic, my wife and I had our first baby and we quickly discovered that we didn’t have any friends nearby that had kids - our friends were couples with no kids or single people - and our families lived far away from us so we found ourselves isolated and alone with a new kid and desperately needing a village.

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I talked about it with some family members and some friends we had that lived across the country and I discovered that many parents of my generation were experiencing a similar thing - the concept of the ‘village to raise kids in’ seemed to be dying or was becoming difficult to build. So I set out to fix that.

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I started researching and found that no products like this existed in the marketplace - matching apps were mainly for dating. I was able to find potential users on places like Twitter and Reddit and I conducted several phone interviews where I utilized The Mom Test to figure out what problems parents were having in this area, so that I could figure out how to design the app to best serve this group.

My Role

I was a solo bootstrapped founder for this. I came up with the idea and performed all the market research and user interviews. I worked through the technical design and UI/UX flows by studying other, similar apps like Tinder, Hinge, Bumble.

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I created the initial wireframes using Figma and even built a mini prototype using Figma that showed the user flow. I hired a designer to clean up the UI and make some improvements, as well as assist with overall branding.

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I hired some developers and worked with them through the technical design to ensure my vision was being met. We ran a standard scrum process with bi-weekly meetings to show progress.

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I built out a marketing plan including go to market strategy, content creation, our unique selling points, potential customers and press releases.

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Once the app was launched, I was on it every day connecting with people and talking to them. I made several friends using it, and I also discovered other difficulties parents were having and struggles they faced, which led me to design future features.

Product Vision & Strategy

For parents that need a strong community of other families around them, Meerkat is an app that uniquely solves this by connecting them with other families in their area.

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Our goal was to grow the user base in concentrated areas and drive connections amongst our user base.

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Our initiative was to create an experience that made it easy to connect with others and build relationships.

Key Features & Functionality

  • Profile creation describing your family (no sensitive details included), interests and some funny prompts

  • GPS location (exact location not shared to protect privacy) but to show others near you

  • Double-blind matching - both users had to ‘like’ each other to be matched. If one wanted to match but another didn’t, there was no connection or notifications.

  • Integrated chat functionality to facilitate conversations

  • Unlimited likes and matches

  • Ability to expand beyond your local area - we were worldwide and you could connect with anyone

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Metrics

  • Accounts created

    • 3500

  • DAU

    • We hit a max of 650 DAU

  • MAU

    • We hit a max of 1200

  • Session length

    • Average session length was 8 minutes, 39 seconds

  • Matches made

    • 1100

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Key Learnings

  • Being a solo, bootstrapped founder is HARD but insanely rewarding. I learned more doing this than in my MBA.

  • A key part of building your own product is first validating revenue ie will people pay me for this product. It’s common for people to say they want something, but the real measure of success is revenue.

  • I added non-intrusive ads into the app - they showed up as if they were a profile and you could just swipe them out of the way.

  • I overestimated the amount of revenue I would earn from ads

  • My goal was to build the app, release it, gather feedback and then build premium features ie figure out what people would pay for. Unfortunately, I ran out of money for further development and couldn’t get this far.

  • This was not the right approach for a bootstrapped founder with a short runway

  • Invest in marketing before the product is built.

  • Keep things lightweight and move fast with testing. This applies to development as well as marketing.

  • Connecting with users is key - I set it up so that I automatically matched with everyone and introduced myself as the creator. This was great because it broke the barrier for discussion right away and I was able to get feedback right away.

  • I really enjoy the process of building something that will bring value to people’s lives.

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