🤓 tl;dr:
modern parenting feels like two jobs: the parenting bits + admin/project manager
feels like parents are set up to fail in the age constant info, lots of people/apps to coordinate and scheduled everything
need a digital counterpart to the speed/intensity of digital comms/expectations
a light, reliable, delightful forcefield - to create and preserve space
Milo is your SMS chaos catcher - to get things out of your head/inbox and keep everyone in the loop and give you that forcefield
😫 Modern parenting has added an extra job
When asked what being a parent feels like, I often say: it feels like like two nearly opposite feeling jobs.
On one hand, I’m this person who is present and caring for the kids - doing all the parent things, fun and hard - teaching them how to tie their shoelaces or make small talk with neighbors. Reading with them at bedtime or packing their school lunch. Asking them what their high and low was today and worrying with them over a tricky friend situation.
This part of parenting is plenty hard and it's constantly shifting but at least it feels like parenting.
It’s the second job I never expected - this administrative assistant- project manager- cruise director who is constantly on her phone, frazzled and muttering under her breath about why-the-f school forms aren’t autofilled with my kids’ info or how it is I missed pizza day buried in line 78 of a 5 page weekly school newsletter.
After we emerged in tact from the first frantic 5 years of keeping this kids alive and cared for, I thought it was smoother sailing. But this second job came out of left field and has been the source of more overwhelm and frustration and exhaustion than before. And I hold this job not just for the kids, which is bad enough, but for everyone in the mix - nanny, my mum, my husband. Because, in any team, someone needs to run point. I get that.
What I don’t get is how I became that person by default. Or how I was ever going to be successful at it. There’s just too many spirit days, too many registrations, too many people/apps and too little time or energy to do it on my own, and without end.
It’s more than disheartening to feel like the single point of failure for my family - if I miss something or forget it, then it's my kids who miss out. And I feel like shit.
But I reject the two options parents are left with:
Suck it up and learn to be a super organized, tons of systems person. The first is easy to reject for me because I’ve tried. Many times. And there lies even worse failure. And so it’s down to:
Let it all go. Subscribe to: "well, if they miss one pizza day or you don’t get into this one swim thing, they’ll live”.
Well, I agree, these are not life ending events. Also, we don’t need to do everything. But that’s not what’s going on here. On the things we really do want to do - like swim lessons or bringing in show+tell - we’re just not set up to succeed.
If I was told about the registration or the pizza day in time, one of us could have easily done the thing.
🌊 A modern information overload and sharing problem.
There's just too much - our human brains were never meant to keep up with the pace and intensity of digital communication, especially over the past 5-7 years. Now everything is scheduled and done online - registrations, school newsletters, library book notices, weekend activities and social things. It seems like if you want to do anything, it needs to be scheduled in advance. And to do that, one person needs to constant see the whole big picture.
Enter the lopsided nature of this modern invisible load. The thing I felt immediately when my girls started school, but that would take me years to figure out what I needed to fix it.
✨ Enter the Forcefield.
Well, if the modern world has been armed with digital information projectiles to send my way, I need my own digital forcefield to take it in and sort it all out. Something to shield and enforce my peace and space, but something that also is smart and discerning and has a crazy high-bar.
Like a really on-top-of-it best friend who’s always texting to say: “don’t forget, this is happening today!” Someone who takes the hit on all the interruptions and incoming, sifts and sorts it and then just tells me the tl;dr when we need it.
Not all of us have that best friend. But I think every parent deserves one.
And that's the singular mission I've been on for 5 years.
Build me this texting-BFF-chaos-catcher to deal with this job #2 so I can have the space and presence to do job #1.
Anytime I get hit with something, let me just text or email it over and have it handled. Figure out what it is, what needs to be done and what impact it has on what were already doing.
So that's what Milo is. An SMS chaos catcher.
You text things in, Milo organizes it and keep everyone in the loop so you don’t have to.
Might sound too simple and it's certainly not for everyone but sometimes simple is incredibly powerful.
🧐 But, how is this different?
When I started solving for this problem more than 5 years ago, few people who didn’t run point for their families would actually acknowledge there was actually a problem to solve here. But now, thanks for tons of research and articles and conversation there has been a lot of attention brought to the frictions that parents face everyday and for that I’m grateful.
That also means there are a lot of other people who want to also solve it. More choice for consumers is a great thing because it should mean better products. But it can also create noise of its own.
So I would say, Milo is focused on doing this extraordinarily well:
1. working first with parent who runs point for the family, to get all that info/context in their heads/messages/docs into one central place.
2. making that info accessible to everyone in the mix.
3. helping to anticipate and plan around all the that info so everyone’s one step ahead.
And lastly: how matters a lot to me, mostly because it’s my family we’re doing this for first.
It needs to be crazy reliable, really lightweight/ simple and… fun. Joyful. Delightful.
That’s the problem I’m trying to solve, that’s how and that’s my bar.
Because I think every parent needs tech that quiets. That helps us do less, better.
And for me, that’s a forcefield.
So that’s what we’ve built.
🤓 Not trying to solve all the things.
The other question I get a lot is: why is Milo on a waitlist?
It’s less about a classic waitlist because we’re trying to control how many people use the product. It’s more, we’re trying to find the people for whom this product is the fit for the problem they want to solve.
Only, that’s tricky when you don’t entirely know what the product is or how it should work. In that case, the best thing I can do is find the people who have the same problem as I do and have them help me test my way to a solution.
Along the way, I’ve realized lots of people don’t have the same main challenge in running their families and Milo ends up not being as helpful as they need. As it turns out, some families need an extra set of hands and could use a virtual assistant; others simply want a display in their kitchen to view their calendar. And in the age of AI, many people want something like a ParentGPT that answers their parenting questions.
I think those are important problem But selfishly, not what we’re solving for.
We’re building for the people who desperately need a forcefield too. To help them manage all the info and the people while freeing up their own working memory.
That’s why the waitlist form - to see if the challenge you had was the one we could help with.
Now that we know what we’re solving for and how we can help, we can be so much clearer:
We’re building an SMS chaos catcher to give parents a forcefield that makes space.
If this sounds like something you could use, I’d love to see if we can help you be able to say yes to these 3 questions, after just 4 weeks:
1. do you feel less anxious every time you get sent another event/reminder/ thing to do
2. does your brain feel less overflowing with things to remember?
3. do you stop getting asked by everyone about everything?
Ultimately, whether it’s with Milo or something else, the thing that is most clear to me: parents need all the help we can get to create more quiet, more space, more presence.
And if tech can help with that, then count me in.
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