We intend to incorporate as a B Corp or equivalent structure in Q1/Q2 2023

USA

Meet Gen-M: the digital native generation that turned mental health statistics upside-down.

We live immersed in a loneliness and anxiety epidemic, partially created by screens and social media's role in our daily lives. Our education system and traditional family learning environments struggle to keep up with the times. As a result, most children enter the online world with few guardrails and skills, and their parents aren’t well equipped to accompany them in the process or even understand the fast-changing subcultures their kid may be immersed in. The answer to this problem is unlikely to be purely technical anymore, and market incentives stand in the way of platforms, manufacturers, and content creators becoming part of the solution -or at least not yet-. We took a very different approach, making a technology-enabled but essentially cultural intervention at the very moment the smartphone enters a kid’s life. Helping parents and communities frame this event as a critical transition into adulthood can create an opportunity to reframe relationships and habits. We can then help kids themselves upskill, maintain their commitments, and gamify incentives to their responsible behavior through digital and physical rewards. With scale, this can both build more resilient communities and society in general and reshape the market incentives for companies to adopt more humane design practices.

If our approach proves to be effective, it is our hope that families all across the world will be able to take advantage of it regardless of their means. This being said, we are well aware that parenting approaches vary wildly, even within a single community, let alone a country or a continent. We plan to start small and consciously, using human-centered design to validate our iterations. We will likely begin working with urban and semi-urban school districts and then expand carefully to ensure the highest likelihood of long-term and effective impact.

We are currently forming diverse semi-formal "advisory circles" of parents, experts, and children that can provide insights and timely feedback, considering our initial outreach demographics and geography but also our global impact ambitions.

We are currently conducting primary market research interviews that are focused on our key stakeholder needs, following the human-centered design approach. Our currently identified main stakeholder groups are:

- Parents of children aged 7 to 15: currently worried about risks associated with a 24/7 connection to the internet that they can’t supervise (inappropriate content, addiction, pederasty, cyberbullying, etc.). Current solutions in the market can provide control but aren’t effective in the long run and often fall short of their immediate promises (can be circumvented, diminish trust, etc.). Our proposal can help build a more solid relationship with their children, gain peace of mind, and understand better the online culture their kids are immersed in (trends, vocabulary...). Whereas our current intervention hypothesis relies on the smartphone gifting moment as an effective entry point, future iterations will likely also serve families where the smartphone is already present.

- Children receiving their first phone: want to be connected and interact with their friends and classmates; not owning a smartphone and being on social media can be isolating. The universe of possibilities is enticing, but they also feel they weren’t offered a choice to participate or not and have to fend off its dangers by themselves. They feel misunderstood by their elders (as most generations have been!) and therefore not trusting. They value their privacy and autonomy, which, once acquired, is challenging to give back. They report the need for trusted channels to express their questions and fears and to be an active part in choosing the technology they use. They also need to navigate their complex social dynamics tied to puberty, classroom dynamics, new responsibilities, etc., which impacts which products are “cool” to use and display. Our proposal aims to address all of them, the latter one being essential. Children must be on board and see the benefit of engaging with our product. Otherwise, efforts will be moot. In the short term, they will likely perceive their basic needs rewarded (through more autonomy, for example), but in the longer horizon, they will hopefully suffer less anxiety, feel more connected, and be prepared to tackle online life more safely and on their own terms.

- School community: within the school, teachers, and counselors see clearly the negative effects of social media and always-on technology on their students. It affects their work, and must face situations they aren’t necessarily well trained for (anxiety and panic attacks, cyberbullying, etc.). Indirectly, our tool can have a net positive impact on the performance of their jobs. But more importantly, they can be engaged in the day-to-day elements of the software and get a “bird’s eye view” of the overall mental health state of each class while preserving individual privacy. This can help them program-specific workshops more timely (such as sex education or privacy protection) and even have an intervention at critical moments.

We are on a mission to create lasting, sustainable, positive impact. Having founded several ventures before, we are well aware of the strings attached to venture capital funding, which we are trying to avoid or delay. Receiving a monetary award would allow us to get closer to the goal of bootstrapping our venture, especially at this critical stage. In particular, we plan to use the funds for the following activities:
- Performing further primary user research
- Establishing 3 stakeholder boards with diversity criteria in mind: subject-matter experts, parents, and gen-Z students
- Validating our hypotheses with parents, kids, and school
- Creating working prototypes to deploy small pilots and finalize the design for a first minimal viable product
- Set up partnerships with 1-3 schools to allow us to deploy pilots, explore engagement modalities featuring counselors/teachers/coaches, and find product-market fit with a sustainable business model.

- Incorporate as a Public Benefit Corporation (B-Corp) after finding a problem-solution fit.

Monetary awards like this one are important in our current phase as they will allow us to focus on the right metrics and delay engagement with venture capital firms until later in time or not do so altogether. Furthermore, it will help us ensure that we are building a product that truly answers the needs of the stakeholder groups we serve and do so while setting the right culture and incentives for the future company.

Our founding team is volunteering their time, intending to transition to full-time by spring-summer 2023. Javier is currently full-time, and David is part-time. However, these funds are not intended to be used to pay founder salaries. Instead, we wish to dedicate all awarded money to product building and validation.

We are currently looking for a potential 3rd co-founder to join our team, ideally with expertise in psychology, education, or software development and adding diversity to the team. Additionally, we are looking for collaborators, advisors, and experts to join forces in tackling an incredibly complex but impactful problem space. We would love to bounce our ideas and process with experts from IDEO and the sponsoring organizations, particularly regarding validating our hypothesis and designing the most effective engagement model with children that would make the solution attractive and not a “single-time use” product. Finally, we would be very grateful for any help identifying interesting partners, ensuring we are reaching and delivering the maximum value to parents and kids.
Regardless of being awarded, we would love to see a community being formed that brings together all participants since we share an important mission!