Introduction to BeAKid YouTube Channel

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Hey everybody, my name is Dan. I am the CEO of a company called Be a Kid, be a kid.com. You can visit us. We're the largest marketplace in U.S. for enrichment programs, summer camps, events that are child related events. I wanted to start this podcast and this is the first one, so forgive me if it's a little rough and raw. I wanted to start a channel where we talk about different subjects. We talk to both the parents, potentially the kids and the service providers and trying to bring the two entities together because it seems to me that today the two sides are very separated. You have your social media, Facebook groups for parents where parents can sort of chat to each other. They don't really allow local afterschool programs to advertise, to really put their word in the only time that the afterschool programs can exist in that format as if when someone from a parent's side asks a question and then someone can recommend that particular afterschool program. Now I'm not here to argue the legitimacy of that. I understand why it's being done in the format of the Facebook group. People don't want too much spam, too much advertising. But at the same time, I realized that not every parent is necessarily looking for something in that moment or thinking about looking at something in this moment. I know thousands and thousands of parents who, for example, come to be a kid who are interested in searching for a particular program, let's say for their daughter, their nine-year-old daughter. And then all of a sudden they see a local event that is happening and all of a sudden they get excited. They weren't even thinking about it. Now they have something to do for the weekend. It seems wonderful. Or they see an activity that perfectly matches their interest of their son, of their 11 or 12 or 13 year old son. And so they weren't necessarily initially looking for that, but it became a huge benefit and, and something that can translate for that child to be a life-changing experience. So again, I understand why Facebook groups do this. I understand why they prohibit certain things. I get it. At the same time, I understand that the industry of children's education, as far as the after-school enrichment programs, whether those after-school enrichment programs are provided within the school itself, or they're provided by third party providers during the winter, during the holiday seasons, vacation camps, day camps, summer camps, whatever it is, they're very separated. As I mentioned, you have your social media for the parents and at the same time, the service providers who are out there struggling, some of them, the mom and pop shops, trying to bring amazing program to the parents are trying to advertise, trying to promote paying a lot of money and as a result don't have the ability to grow at the same rate that they want to grow. The only ones who are able to potentially grow are the ones who have a lot of money, whether they're big programs that are part of the franchise or they're just somebody who has a larger budget. Having said that, a larger budget, a bigger place is absolutely not a qualification for being the best program. I know some of the most amazing local enrichment programs were provided by people who had mom and pop shops who quit their jobs and went into that business because they really believed in providing an amazing programs for kids and wanted to support the local community. And those are the people who need to be supported as well as the ones who have the bigger budgets, who might provide a bigger variety of afterschool programs. Maybe they even have the budget to provide a cheaper programs, although that's not necessarily the case. So be a kid was started as an attempt to bring the two entities together.

You know, for comparison, you can think of it as an Airbnb. Before Airbnb, a lot of these, the places that were renting their private houses would post it on Craigslist, would post it on social media, would create their own websites and all of that was fine. There's just wasn't a single place where you as a parent could really go or you as an adult who wanted to take a vacation and who wanted to go to a particular place could go and explore a variety of different options. Now, a little bit about me. Again, my name is Dan. I have three kids. My son is 20 years old, about to graduate from college. My daughter is in her first year in college in Tampa. And my younger daughter, who is 12 years old is currently in middle school. So I have gone through the entire process, if you will, from very early childhood, educational experiences to trying to find local playgrounds, organize play dates, try to figure out where to do birthdays, to be honest, at one point when people would say Chuck E. Cheese. the smell would hit me even though I wasn't anywhere close to that place because we've just gone to so many birthdays at Chuck E Cheese that distinct smell of burned pizza was, I think, just so ingrained in myself, in my nose that I would smell it right away. And I thought to myself, you know, it's interesting that people choose that particular place. Is it? the simplicity of going to that facility? Well, I mean, there's gotta be other places where it's just as simple to book something, to organize different events, to organize birthdays or special events, whatever they are. Is it the cost? Certainly Chuck E. Cheese, for example, was an affordable place that you could go and create play dates, but, and do birthdays. And then I started to realize, and I wanted to find out where I was living, whether in fact there was maybe no other options other than, the Chuck E cheese option. And I started looking and it turned out that there were hundreds, sometimes thousands of options if you would just go 20 minutes away from your house. That's a huge radius to to explore. And there was incredible amount of options. Yet for some reason, we didn't book them. And in fact, the majority of them, I didn't even know that they existed, which surprised me because I grew up in that place. I thought I knew everything. but no, I just didn't know about it. And I wanted to understand why. And I wanted to bring those places to the forefront so that other parents can experience those, awesome, amazing enrichment programs or special event, places, where they can have fun, where the kids can have fun, run around, play around, get some education. And so I started initially creating a simple database, a database of local afterschool programs. Now it wasn't the first one. There were already plenty of places that were list services for some of these afterschool programs. What I always found frustrating about those places is that they really would only list those companies who pay them. And as a technologist, as somebody who understood the internet, as someone who was a parent, I felt cheated. I felt like they were taking advantage of me in order to get money for them. Because when they would list two, three companies in my area that they were able to get some of the money from. I thought to myself, once I started diving into it, I thought, wait a minute, I know there's so many more options. And so you're just not showing them to me. And I felt that to be a betrayal of sort of this core promise when you talk about education that we are all in, we're all participating in an effort to elevate our kids to the next level, to give them an amazing childhood, to give them an opportunity to learn new things, to experiment with things while they were in that experimental stage of their life and they had no worries about having to afford them. And so I didn't like it.

So I started Be a Kid and part of Be a Kid is if you actually go to Be a Kid, you will see that we list over 170,000 service providers on our platform and majority of them we list absolutely free. In fact, they probably don't even know that they exist on our platform. We actually hired editors whose job was to develop amazing profiles. you go again, especially if you're from New England states, we're moving from the New England states towards the West Coast. You will find that some of these programs have some of these profiles have been developed in a really amazing way. show all kinds of information. We show pictures. We show the programs that they offer, the age groups that they support, what kind of kids they support, the experiences your kids are going to have. And we show all of that free of charge. Now there's clearly options to upgrade, clearly options to participate in marketing and then blah, blah, blah. Yes, we are a business. We do want to make money, but at the core, a parent can still go to beakid.com and find 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 different programs. And if you do not find the programs that you know are available in your local community, you can email us at support@beakid.com. And we will gladly put those programs into our database and develop them and spend the time and the money to create an amazing profile for them. So we can do that. So that's really the core of Be a Kid. What I want this podcast, this YouTube channel to be, excuse me.

What I want this channel to be is really an honest conversation about everything around kids education from both sides, both from the side of a parent, a family member, a caretaker, a grandparent, and also from the side of the service provider. So we are talking about very different approaches to understanding what the other side is looking for. I've been to a number of events with service providers. I remember this one time I went to Canada and, we were presenting at this conference. had a table and one gentleman came up from a school district.

And we said, look, you really want to make an effort to make the registration and payment and form process, filling out the forms, simple for the parents because it will save them time. And they will appreciate that time saving because parents, do care. about where their kids are spending time. And so not only do you want to make it easier, but you also want to make it as transparent as possible about what it is that kids are going to participate in, what the kids are going to be doing on a day-to-day basis, who is going to be teaching them, what kind of facility you have. And the guy actually got incredibly angry with me. And he basically said, you don't know what you're talking about. I can tell you parents do not care. And this is the time when I already had two kids and I was right in the middle of sort of the difference between my two older kids are only about a year and a half. So I think there were about five or six years old. We were doing all kinds of activities. We were signing them up for different enrichment programs, theater, sports, all kinds of things. And I said to myself, well, that's baloney. I care. And I know a lot of other parents do care. And this guy literally started screaming at me that I am clueless about the parents and that all parents are looking to do is to just drop off a kid and get the heck out of Dodge as quickly as possible after they do that. And I think that it's bullshit. Okay. Well, let's be honest. I think it's complete and utter bullshit. Now, are there parents like that? Probably. Of course there are. Chances are that kind of parents are not going to spend a whole lot of money taking kids to different enrichment programs. Maybe once in a while when they just want to drop the kid off and get rid of them and have a little bit of free time, maybe they'll do that. But overall, they're just they're not going to spend if they don't care, they're not going to spend the money on the kid. They probably have some other ideas on how to spend the money in a better way that they think. but majority of parents absolutely do care. So I wanna be able to cover the benefits of after school programs, how to choose after school programs, how to get discounts on after school programs, how to communicate and what questions to ask an enrichment program about what it is that they offer, what to look for when you walk into their facilities, whether it's worth it to communicate to other parents.

that you share an activity with. How much money or how much energy could you possibly save if you organize some kind of a carpooling option? But at the same time, I wanna talk to the service providers. I wanna talk to the service providers about how it's best to organize your website, how to make it run better, how to make it clean and clear for parents to understand what it is that they're looking for and how to display options in the way that it's easier for parents to understand it and go through the registration process. How to organize the registration experience in such a way that it becomes a very easy and not a difficult journey for the parent or the grandparent for that matter. lot of the, again, we'll talk about it a lot of the after school enrichment programs are paid by the grandparents or even sometimes the registration is filled out and organized by the grandparent. So there's a lot of conversations that we can have. We can have a conversation about raising kids and bullying and punishing your kids and how to talk to kids, how to engage kids, what kind of questions to ask them after they go to after school programs when you pick them up. There's just a plethora of different topics that we're going to be talking about now. I think it's good enough for the first episode. think we're about 18 minutes into this episode. and, what I want to try to do, and again, you can object, you can tell me that it's a terrible format and then we'll think about reach, changing this format is I've never been a huge script kind of a guy. Everything I said today is just coming out of me it wasn't scripted. I don't have any notes. have nothing on my computer. I'm talking directly to you. I'm not reading off of anything. I didn't even make any kind of notes in advance of this podcast. I also do not plan on editing this podcast or, or YouTube channel. don't even know what it's called. Okay. I want it to be raw. I want you to see that as a founderof a business as a father, I can make mistakes. I can say the wrong things. I can make stupid mistakes and say stupid things. That's okay. If you want to comment on that, if you tell me that I don't know what I'm talking about, it's totally fine. I take criticism perfectly well. You're not going to offend me. Okay. If you do not like this style of podcast, but you like the idea of what we're doing, just go ahead and comment. Let me know in which way you would change it and we'll talk about it. Okay. We'll discuss it. Maybe we'll, we'll do a live event at one point and we'll answer questions and we'll talk about it. I also want to start bringing in a guest speakers. I want to interview business owners. I want to understand what makes their business worth visiting or attending. And, you know, everybody says that they're the best, that they have the most amazing programs, that they've developed the most amazing curriculum. From a parent point of view, those are just words that everybody says the proof is in the pudding and you have to eat the pudding before you can figure out the proof. And that's sometimes a very hard pill to swallow because you have to give your child somewhere in order to understand and how do you reconcile it. So we'll talk about that as well. We'll invite business owners. We will invite experts. We will invite summer camp owners, we will talk to medical professionals, we'll talk about sports professionals about what's valid and not valid, what are some of the ideas that are floating around there, some of the myths that are floating around there that may be dispelled or in fact may be very true when it comes to their type of a sport commitment, age, participation requirement, we can talk about all of that. Anyway, thank you again.

My name is Dan. You can call me Dan, Danny, Mr. B. However you want to address me is totally fine. Hopefully it's all in a fun, respectful manner, but I'm sure this is YouTube. It's not going to be the case all the time. Let's explore and let's see where it goes. Welcome. And I'll talk to you soon.