Launching Maple (and the start of so much more).
Roughly one year ago we took our first steps on our journey of building Maple inspired by the realization that our 50+ years of advancing and changing every industry through technology — improving our productivity, communication, and automating execution — has overlooked one of the most important jobs we will ever have in our lives: parenting.
We’ve come to realize the path we are walking at Maple represents more than an opportunistic chance to shape an industry but a chance to change a system that is failing so many.
Through thousands of conversations my teammates and I have had, I’ve learned two key things over the last year that has shaped our initial product offering and vision of the future.
First lesson:
Parenting, like so many other parts of life, follows the 80/20 rule: One person does the majority of the work, and everyone else benefits from the outcome. Typically one partner, often the mom, takes on a disproportionate amount of household labor, even if they are also working outside the home.
The lack of technology isn’t the core problem however, its absence in the home has allowed the lack of home equality to persist and the inheritance of a multi-generational “home operating system” that has not been favorable for half the parents in the world we live in. The solutions over the past decades simply have not addressed the lack of relationship equalities at home, so the needle has not moved to make life easier. As of today, no one has bent the curve. If anything, parenting has gotten increasingly harder.
So while it is no longer the year 1950, it is fair to say that marriages, raising children, and running a household often look like a time capsule.
Second Lesson: From these same conversations, we also learned that, now more than ever, all caregivers have the best of intentions — not just the partner doing the majority of the lifting. They want to be involved in their child’s life, help at home, and have a thriving career. This has caused a constant state of feeling overwhelmed, unsure how to help and trying to be “everyone’s everything” amongst most parents.
Maple is launching publicly to address these lessons, on both iPhone and Android for our families in the US and Canada, making it easier to parent together. Here are four ways we are going to empower families and help parents feel less burnt out:
Quickly share the mental load: It’s now a family affair — and not just around one person to manage everything. Create household topics for your whole family to rally around and stay organized.
Make it easier to work together: Discuss what needs to happen, create tasks together, plan and manage your family needs. The tools are now there to work together from anywhere.
Making the invisible work visible: From daily reporting to simple filtering, Maple helps you understand how busy everyones day truly is, and how hard everyone is trying to work together.
Built in help: As the first family platform, we’ve partnered with companies to help you accomplish your workload faster with built-in partner integrations. For example, you can use TaskRabbit or buy Yumi baby food directly inside of Maple within seconds.
Maple is recognizing and addressing the elephant in the room: the world has changed in every way for the better (some aspects of inequality and technology sectors slower than others) but for the majority, the way our households operate have not changed at all for generations- if ever. While our roles inside the walls we live in have not changed, our outside world has changed drastically. As an example, in 1940, 1 in 10 children under the age of 5 lived in a household where both parents worked- today, 2 out of 3 of children have both of their parents active in the workforce. While the modern dad has been more involved than fathers of past generations at home- quadrupling his time spent caring for his children on average since 1960, the workload at home is still disproportionately on mom- giving her two full time jobs as both primary caregiver and full time employee. And when the world was hit with COVID-19, 3 million women, a significant portion of them Moms, left the workforce, sacrificing their career to return back home as the primary caregiver while Dad remained in the workforce to make the bacon. Maple’s platform is facilitating the opportunity for families to move past these norms
In an email exchange with one of Maples investors, Lucy Deland, of Inspired Capital, sums this moment of time up perfectly for the future of parenting, “If ever there was a time for this platform to emerge, it’s today. In 2020, mothers are ready to expose and share the iceberg of work they take on for their children, their family, and their partners. I’m optimistic in believing that their partners (and their support networks) are ready to embrace and support them. No doubt that technology can serve a massive purpose in starting to chip away at this burden. A burden that can hopefully be both smaller and shared more equally going forward.”
Maple is the easiest way to parent together.
As a company, we are on a mission to improve the quality of life for families, and we hope our efforts as a company will make life better for your family — starting now.
Michael Perry
Founder & CEO
