🌲 Say 👋🏽 to Milo's Holiday Helper GPTs
We're building AI-powered help so parents can cut through the extra mental load this holiday season. A new little helper each week for the next 5 weeks. First up? Help with those elves on shelves.
While we love sharing curated ideas, what we love even more is building products that help obliterate that invisible load.
So starting this week, we’re building parents a little AI-powered helper each week of this holiday season, inspired by requests from around our parent community.
👋🏽 Holiday Helper
Say hi to Milo’s Holiday Helper. AI-powered help via SMS, focused on the types of things that feel crushing during the holidays because of the added mental load. Things that my family and I love doing, but that J and I could use a bit of back-up to make easy and obvious.
We started this week with something small but that represents the holiday mental load - Elf on the Shelf - a thing that our family has chosen to show up for, but to do it well, requires a lot of extra mental thinking and planning, at a time we have none to spare.
Each week, we’ll tackle different challenges - from gifts to food to traditions to memories to logistics. Sign up and try it out if you’d like some Elf ideas now (more below) or get ready for the ones to come.
🎄Help with the Elf’ing Mental Load
Elf on the Shelf is a tradition for many families. It’s a fun thing for the kids to wake up to each morning in December - seeing what kind of antics their family elf has gotten up to.
We resisted this craze for so many years because we couldn’t imagine adding one more thing to tackle each night, during one of the busiest times of the year. I was also mildly uncomfortable with the idea that the elf was somehow there to “spy” on the kids and report behaviour back to Santa.
But then 2020 happened and during Covid, we found ourselves welcoming Gingerbread as a way to make a very not-usual holiday season feel a bit more silly and festive. We also focused on the idea of “inviting this elf into our family” and for it to be centered on just mischief and mild mayhem.
Of course it’s not a “one and done” kind of thing and over the past two years, we’ve found ways to make it fit our family’s style. The delight in the girls’ eyes makes all those late night scrambles worth it.
Still. I’ve always wanted an easier way to come up with ideas that are creative and fun, but are dead simple. I don’t want to scroll through the hells of Google or the perfection of Pinterest. I just want to be able to say: I have 5 minutes and zero energy… or I have 20 minutes and I’d like to do something with a little extra backstory and be given some options to work with.
So that’s why this week, we’re starting with something simple and small, but that makes carrying this tradition a bit lighter each night.
Just sign up and text “Hi Milo” to the Holiday Helper line. For this week’s helper, Milo will ask you some questions about the kids age, your elf’s name and anything else about your family’s tradition. Then you’ll get your options. Do it night by night or figure out the whole week in advance.
✨ Coming up:
🎁 Gifts are on everyone’s minds - this is a bit of a trickier one to solve well but we’re on the case. Get ready to fly through your list.
Do you have something you want solved?
We’re taking ideas from parents - tell us what to build and we’ll build it for you. If it has mental load written all over it, pop it onto our community build-list:
We hope we can help lighten even a little of the load this holiday season 💕
xo,
-avni + milo team
🔦 Technical spotlight
A big part of what we love is using these cutting edge technologies to make everyday parent lives easier.
And that’s what we’re doing here, with hot-off-the-presses release by OpenAI - specifically their GPT store and assistants.
This little helper has been built on their new Assistants API - to create “GPTs” that can both be used by ChatGPT but also in other places and ways, like we’re doing with SMS.
For this week, we’ve kept it simple to demonstrate how easy it is to build a thing. Like Shopify, where merchants can focus on the making/selling of the thing, not the tech/payments/SKU management, these GPTs enable makers to focus on the end problem they’re trying to solve, and not the technical details.
You can try it too (you’ll need a ChatGPT+ subscription) but it’s super simple and fun - experiment away!
Starting next week we’ll be sharing more technically complex helpers to help with more involved problems but for now, showing how simple is beautiful.