David - I think some of the criticism you are seeing is because, while this idea may have merit, your execution of it here on HN feels weird. This "Urgent" post feels hasty, unorganized and after reading it I don't know what to do. Let alone try to help.
I'd encourage you to take a step back, organize your thoughts and put up a real website asking for help so it has more of a presence. Nothing goes "viral" (your words) from this kind of post on HN.
If you believe in what you are doing, stick with it, get organized and keep your chin up. :-)
This might work if you do background checks like a daycare center would do. If not you are asking for legal trouble if one or some of the parents or babysitters have a criminal sex offender background with children.
In the Catholic Church all people who volunteer their services for the church when children are around have to complete a "Protecting God's Children" workshop and pass a background check. They also use a buddy system to make sure nobody is alone with a child.
That might be a reason that your church rejects it as well.
Orionblastar, thanks for your thoughtful advice. Yes, we've debated using background checks, but I worry they provide a false sense of security. Truth is, it's not very hard for a bad guy to fake his way through a background check.
Instead, we're experimenting with what we call "Mommy Dating." A mom (our users are all moms so far, except for me) can browse selfie videos of other moms in her neighborhood. We believe that "a video is worth ten-thousand words." If she sees a mom with whom she feels chemistry, she can set up a coffee date at a public place, then perhaps a playdate, before deciding whether to share childcare.
I have great faith in a parent's intuition about other parents, and I see our primary job as making the introductions and letting parents create their own village as they see fit.
Hope this clarifies, David
Regardless of whether or not background checks are effective, if you don't require them you are increasing your chances of being sued when (not if) something bad happens. At the very least, speak to an experienced lawyer about it.
Women can be sex offenders as well as men. Something that is over looked but background checks help to reveal. You can have a mother with videos of her children and photos and not know she is a sex offender with prior convictions.
Ok, but why is your service so necessary that your bishop should pay you to do this instead of serving in a parish? There are a million social networks and online communities where mothers can go looking for other mothers. Frankly, you could do this with a Facebook group and YouTube, in your free time between more important duties.
That, my friend, I think, is an overall poor strategy for anything you expect to grow strong and reliably. And since you're talking about people's kids that's a recipe for disaster.
Nothing really of note grows quickly or on a tight schedule. If you want this to work you'll need to hire or at least work closely with experienced people in the child care industry. A programmer's forum isn't really going to help you there.
So, my advice? Abandon your current plan, regroup, and seek out more experienced hands and eyes and a community.
Also, this is your first day on HN? Welcome welcome! But your scatter shot strategy isn't helping you.
I would recommend keeping your priesthood, pension and benefits and continue your ministry and build this as a side project or seek donations to fund it and have contractors build it. I don't see anything pressing that has to take you away from your current career. I would make amends with your church and build this concurrently.
If things take off or you get funding eventually then quit your day job.
Start listening to StartUpsForTheRestOfUs.com lots of great advice for just your situation.
Can't read the terms and conditions, when I click on the link it loads under the youtube video so I can't see the top paragraph.
I don't understand the urgency in this. Why would your church be kicking you out for trying to create an app? I can see if they don't want to be part of it, but not understanding why you can't have a side project, etc...
Jpeterson, tx for your note. My dev and I will figure out what's wrong with the T&C display.
The urgency is that yesterday, the church rejected my application to do this site as my ministry. Without an authorized ministry, I'm not allowed to make pension payments, which means my benefits (life ins., disability, pension) lapse after a few months. Also, my bishop can order me to stop working on an unauthorized ministry.
But if I get a parish position, those tend to be all-consuming positions that don't allow for the kind of time and energy one needs to get a start-up rolling. ParentVillage is the ministry I feel called to, and I'm committed all-in to that.
to PirateBroadcast: Thanks for your comment. I just re-read my own Linked In profile, and I'm scratching my head. Where does it suggest ParentVillage is a for-profit business? All I can tell you is, no one on my 3 person team, including me, has received any money or promise of it. If you can quote the text you're referring to, I'll address it. Best, David
First the business side of things, then the Christian side of things.
I ascribe to a similar business thought process as Marcus Lemonis: look for people, process, and product. I have read through all of your pages, including the articles you link to, and here is the "people" part that I see. There is you. You seem to have a background as a marriage book writer and some sort of amateur family counselor. It doesn't seem like you have an professional training in this, however your books have been mildly successful.
Next there is your team which seems to be a "technical person from a large silicon valley company". And that's all we know about that. Finally, there is your wife who is mentioned in a few places, who is a business professor at Stanford. I'm including her because, well, there aren't that many other people to include.
A small team can make a ton of progress on a new product or business like this. But yours isn't working. The people, you included, are not helping us to feel your pain, understand the problem you are trying to fix, or help us to know how your product will fix that problem at all. As far as I can tell you are a desperate minister trying to make a pension, not a concerned manager of a not for profit babysitting assistance program.
From a process prospective it seems what you have done is the bare minimum to try to get to your goal (remember: we think your goal is to get a pension not make a product). The Lean movement says to test out your theory and then grow from there, so you could argue that you are trying to follow Lean. But honestly, if you are, you need to take a step back and try again with more detail and from a different angle.
Finally, product. Well, you don't seem to have a product. You are putting mothers on "mommy dates". Is this an unsolved problem now? Is this not something that Facebook, local community centers, churches, and other meeting places do already? And in fact doesn't your service make this more dangerous, because it speeds up the already dangerous process of trying to find a suitable person to watch your children? You see companies that provide baby sitting services for a fee take on a serious level of liability. They say for your money, we are going to make sure we have qualified professionals that will not harm your children. You, on the other hand, are saying for no fee I am going to show your 1 minute video to other people and hopefully they will be the right fit for you. That's not a product anyone wants.
The second problem with your product (and honestly there are probably a hundred more, but I think I will stop here), is you are discounting others lifestyles. You haven't said this in words but this is the impression I get: "You are a stay at home mom, she is a working mom who can't watch her kids, you should help her. It's the right thing to do." You haven't spoken about how a stay at home mom should value her time (read: pricing the babysitting services she is providing), how the stay at home mom should decide how much babysitting to provide, or how the stay at home mom should mitigate her own liability when taking in other peoples children to babysit. There are many other questions you have not answered for your potential customers. So, you have no product.
Now, for the Christian part. I am a very devote Christian myself, by my own measurement very active in my church and my faith, and frankly I don't see how this is a ministry. You are a Minister who would like a pension paid for by (what I consider personally) the sacred funds that people have donated to help the churches and faiths cause. We, those who donate to a Christian church, do so because we believe that money should go to the work of the Lord. Is this the work of the Lord? Heck, I am not sure this is even work for you, let alone work of the Lord. Why not help the poor, the homeless, abused children, single mothers, battered women... the list goes on. I am not here to tell you what to do as a Christian. I believe this could, possibly, be a business someday. But I don't believe this is a Christian Ministry. Pick one or the other.
trcollinson, thanks for your thoughtful comments. A few points:
As far as training, I did my M.Div at Princeton & General Seminaries, with a chaplaincy in the pediatric ICU of a major hospital and hundreds of hours of pastoral counseling experience. But I don't have a psych degree. Perhaps that's what you meant.
Regarding my product, this is an MVP. I consider it "Draft 1" of a solution and I seek parents as beta-testers to help me come up with a better "Draft 2." I have been using Stanford's Design Thinking in my process, and the many parents I have interviewed, at length, don't seem as confident as you that their childcare problems can be solved with a Facebook page or the local community center.
Regarding danger, before Air BnB and Couchsurfing, people said, "Me? Sleep in a random stranger's home? Dangerous!"
Before Uber and Lyft, people said, "Me? Ride in a random stranger's car? Dangerous!" Sharing communities are on the rise, and I believe they can speak to the problem of childcare--somehow. Not sure how yet, but we're experimenting.
I have tremendous faith in a parent's instinctive intuition to find other parents in her neighborhood, with whom she feels chemistry, over several face-to-face meetings, so that parents can cooperate to share the burden of childcare--just like our ancestors did in villages for millennia. If we are to find a solution to childcare, we cannot lead with fear, but rather with cooperation and goodwill.
Regarding the work of the Lord, ParentVillage strives to address the poor by giving them a co-op model where they can barter to solve their childcare needs, rather than the current cash model, which those I have interviewed find extremely prohibitive. The single mothers you listed are another demographic that I find particularly oppressed by the current cash model for childcare, and I hope that "Draft 4" (or perhaps 14) of ParentVillage can offer them some relief to an overwhelming aspect of single parenting.
Finally, neither my Bishop, nor the Episcopal Church, are paying me anything to work on this ministry. And I'm 50, with two kids close to college. I assure you that every mainline-denomination minister has a pension plan for which she has worked hard, and is grateful. To lose my pension and the accompanying insurance benefits is a serious blow to any minister's livelihood.
Fantastic! You should add all of this immediately. Suddenly you are a M.Div from Princeton with extensive experience in counseling and families. You have done extensive research. You have a process that beats what people are thinking about as the established processes. You still need to work on the product differentiator, but go for it and do it. The problem I am pointing out is that right at this moment your material doesn't show this at all. Fix it and you may get even more to sign up.
One other large issue you may run into is geography area issues. But if you get to that point then you will have solved other major areas of issue with your business plan and you can probably solve the geographic ones as well.
As for the benefits from the Episcopal Church, I assume that those cost money from the Church. I know you do not draw a salary from the Church, but pensions and health insurance still cost money. Many of us, myself included, have given up the safety and security of main stream jobs in order to handle start ups. You may have to do that yourself to make this work.
I'd encourage you to take a step back, organize your thoughts and put up a real website asking for help so it has more of a presence. Nothing goes "viral" (your words) from this kind of post on HN.
If you believe in what you are doing, stick with it, get organized and keep your chin up. :-)