Abound

Language and literacy skills predict school and life success - they drive how children learn new material and collaborate with others.  Yet only 37% of students in the U.S. reach reading proficiency by the end of 3rd Grade, and only around 10% of students achieve advanced reading skills .  

Core to the outcomes described above is the fact that many parents don’t realize that language and literacy skills accumulate from birth through thoughtful back-and-forth conversations.

Abound solves this with an app for parents, that empowers them to build crucial language, literacy, and associated critical thinking skills via conversation.  Our app is grounded in research, but designed to fit into the busy daily lives of parents.

These skills are developed in similar ways in every language, and so our ultimate goal is to build our app in other languages so that it may be used by parents all over the world.

In the U.S. alone, there are 35 million children each year between the ages of 1-9 that aren’t reaching their reading potential.

While the teaching ecosystem is complicated, the root of the problem is simple: 1) people don’t understand how reading and language skills should be taught and developed, and 2) we teach children these skills too late.

To the first point, many people (and teachers) think of reading as being taught only through letters and sounds, but these skills also largely require the development of conceptual knowledge, vocabulary, and social and emotional skills.  All of these skills, including letters and sounds skills, are best learned through conversation.  To the second point, these skills accumulate from birth, not at age 5 or 6 when children start kindergarten and parents typically start thinking about reading for the first time.

This implies that parents should be involved in helping their children learn these skills from a young age, but young parents, struggle in the day to day because they have such little time to focus on their child’s development, and when they do find the time they don’t know what they could or should be doing to help their child’s development.  They feel powerless.

Ultimately, we aspire to serve all parents across geographies with children between the ages of 0 - 9.  In the immediate future, we’re focusing on helping parents with children between the ages of 3 - 6 living near urban environments in the U.S.

The majority of parents hope for their children to develop into healthy, and well-adjusted adults, and so we target parents as the stakeholder most invested in early language and literacy outcomes for their children, and the most able to have an impact on their child’s development during these early years.

Over the past year we’ve conducted extensive research in collaboration with parents to build out our solution.  We’ve conducted over 50 parent interviews and focus groups at different stages of our solution development process (beginning from solution inception, to beta product prototyping and piloting where we find ourselves now).  To supplement this process, over the past six months we’ve conducted both a small pilot and beta test, collecting feedback from 75 parents on working versions of our product, so that we can continue to co-create and improve our solution.  

We’ve also secured an agreement with a local school district to pilot our solution with 450 families this fall.

Abound is a parent-focused app, that empowers parents to build crucial early language and literacy skills in their young children.

Parents, upon entering the app, are prompted to fill out an easy and dynamic questionnaire in building out their child’s learning profile (~15 minutes), which outlines how their child is developing across the range of crucial early language and literacy skills.  These questions are a part of an algorithm that translates parent’s observations of their children into useful data that the app can use to personalize content recommendations for the parent.

Parents are then given recommendations of conversations they can have with their child every day (centered around new ideas, new words, or new books).  These conversations typically take anywhere between 3-7 minutes, and are grounded in research on early language and literacy coming out of the Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Early Language and Literacy Group.  They are also designed so that they can be easily implemented in the parent’s busy daily routine, as we frame these conversations around activities the parents are already doing (e.g., commuting with the child to school, eating breakfast, doing a bed-time routine).

Over time, as parents observe their children’s growth and learning, they will be prompted by the app to answer new (or edit original) answers to the questionnaire, and in turn will receive updated content recommendations.  Parents will also be able to view a dashboard of their child’s literacy profile and progress that they can easily share with other caretakers (e.g., teachers).

Through extensive research we’ve found that busy, working parents have four core needs in an early learning solution for their child: 1) they want it to be easy to use and quick, 2) they want validation and confidence that the solution is helping their child learn and develop in a positive way, 3) they want the solution help them create an enjoyable experience with their child (e.g., they don’t want to feel like they’re punishing their child by teaching them), and 4) finally, more and more, they want to limit their children’s screen time and encourage healthy learning.

These core needs drive much of the design of our solution, and because of this we’re confident that our solution will not only be truly helpful for parents, but easy to engage with in their day-to-day.

First, our content is grounded in a much broader understanding of how pre-k children learn language and literacy skills.  While most offerings in the space focus on teaching reading and language through the 26 letters of the alphabet and 44 sounds, our app teaches a much broader, holistic set of skills that contribute to healthy language and literacy development (e.g., vocabulary, critical thinking, self-awareness and regulation).  And this approach is grounded in the latest research in early learning.

Second, our solution is innovative in how users engage with it.  Unlike most offerings in the space, we don’t teach early learning by putting a phone or video in front of a child and creating a passive experience.  Rather, our app acts as a tool for parents to reference, so that they can engage in productive, personal, and offline back and forth conversations with their child.  Language building requires face-to-face interaction.  Teaching through conversation is not only more effective, but it also means that any parent can use it to create effective learning experiences and stronger connections with their child, without need for any previous knowledge, or any additional resources outside of their phone.  

Finally, our solution is innovative in its design and user experience.  We’ve managed to boil down and translate difficult to access research into tactical, day-to-day conversations that parents can have with their children without having to change their routines.  Meanwhile, we’ve drawn from behavior science to include “nudges” within the app that drive parent action.

At the highest level our solution is an application that can be made available via phone or tablet.  As mentioned earlier, this app is being applied in novel ways as it relates to early learning. Parents, the users, leverage the app to change and inform their behaviors related to their children, but don’t use it as a means for consuming content passively.

Embedded within our app is our content recommendation algorithm.  We ask parents to complete a brief questionnaire through which we collect observational data on their children.  Using this information we develop a learning profile for their child and provide personalized content recommendations for the parent based on this profile and the child’s specific development needs.

Under the current system, parents don’t know how crucial the early years are to a child’s long term language and literacy development.  So many children will only begin intentionally learning these skills by the time they get to Kindergarten. Many teachers at these schools haven’t been trained in how to teach literacy effectively.  And so a young child may be assumed to be on track, judging by the fact that they can sound out a simple book (e.g., Danny and the Dinosaur), because that is how many teachers judge reading effectiveness, when in fact, their development may be behind in many ways.  The only formal state-wide assessments provided for students around language and literacy occurs at the end of Third Grade, at which point parents might discover that their child is behind for the first time. But at this point, it’s difficult for the student to catch-up, and their performance gap often widens over time.  

Ideally, a parent should be empowered to help their child develop a strong foundation early on, and have transparency on their development journey.  Abound gives parents this. This way, the child comes into formal learning with a strong foundation in these crucial skills, or if the child is struggling, the parent has transparency on this early on and has the tools to advocate for their child with schools, or the knowledge to make decisions to help their child’s development.  The student is set up for school success.

Across prototypes and iterations of our solution we’ve served a cumulative amount of 500 people at this point.  These are people who have used our product for sustained periods of time and have seen value in their use.  

Given that we are formally launching a 400 parent pilot in September, and shortly thereafter are making our solution available for widespread adoption across our target population, in one year’s time we expect to be serving 40,000 people.

Over five years we expect to be serving 5 million people, in and outside of the U.S., and addressing not only the crucial early language and literacy skills, but other crucial skills as well (e.g., early numeracy, early SEL).

1 year

Product 

Our team aspires to provide a high quality app for early language and literacy development, with a rich content library for parents of children ages of 0-9.

Usage and impact 

We have 40,000 parent users that see positive learning outcomes.  Our app is made available to all parents across demographics. The large majority of parent-users likely will have children between the ages 3-6 and be middle income.  From our research we suspect this group to be the "lead users" given their interests.  We will have made strong headway into providing the app at scale to under-served segments, with 5-10% of our users coming from this segment.

5 years

Product 

We have a full-fledged digital solution for parents with children ages 0-9 including:

 - A wide range of additional content offerings including early numeracy support, and early SEL support for parents

 - An advanced assessment mechanism through which we can assess a child's development across a wide range of categories

 - Is made available for all parents with children ages 0-9 in the U.S., and several regions internationally (e.g., South America)

 - Begins to act as a mediator to additional social support services for parents (e.g., caretakers, early pediatrics)

Usage and impact 

We have 5 million users, at least 75% of which have children reading and speaking at proficient or above age level.  Over 1.5 million of our users come from under-served geographies, income segments, and demographics.

Outside of the day-to-day challenges we face in building our social impact solution, we also often think about how to overcome three major barriers we foresee in the way of achieving our outlined goals.

The first major challenge lies in the nature of what we’re trying to achieve: behavior change.  Unlike most products in the early learning space that allow for passive consumption of content by the child, we are an app that helps parents change and improve the way they engage with their children, and this requires behavior change.  This change is tough promote (as is all change), and requires thoughtful solution design, especially keeping in mind that our audience is busy working parents of young children, with a thousand things on their mind.

The second major challenge comes with trying to achieve financial sustainability as an organization while ultimately intending to cater to under-served segments that may not be able to afford our product.  We’ve put great thought into this question and outline our thinking in greater detail in answers to come.

The final major challenge is a cultural one.  Many families, particularly those of cultures and languages outside of the U.S., and in under-served regions, don’t think of parents as having a crucial role in teaching their children.  Moreover, these parents may not think of learning as happening at such a young age. For example, many families don’t have a culture of talking to their children, when in fact talking is crucial to a child’s development.

The first challenge we’re addressing through an incredibly disciplined product design process, and the introduction of high quality U/X talent.  We’ve been very deliberate about co-creating and iterating on our product with our target audience to ensure that they want to use our product, they actually do use our product, and that they see value in our product when using it.  In addition, we’ve brought on high quality design talent who we partner with to ensure that our app journey is intuitive, and creates feelings of accomplishment, progress, and validation in our user.

We’re addressing our second challenge through innovative business model design, thoughtful choice of our target customer, and a recognition that we will have to evolve our business model overtime to cater to underserved segments in the most effective way.  We outline this thinking in greater detail in answers to follow.

Our third challenge we plan to address in three ways in the long term. Firstly, we will continue to make the research on the benefits of early learning more and more accessible, and to continue to improve our assessments algorithms so that parents can visualize the impact of using our solution quickly.  Secondly, we will engage with trusted partners of parents in different cultural communities to gain access to these audiences. And finally, we will continue to improve product messaging and content to make it more relateable to certain communities (for example, including content specific to the history of a certain culture).

We have three people working on our team working full time (our leadership team), two people working part-time (our customer success manager and ops and payroll manager), four contractors (two helping develop our app content, and two developers helping us to build our app), and finally we have two interns over the summer.

Joan Kelley (CEO) is a Harvard-trained educator and researcher in language and literacy development.  During her 10 years as part of the Early Language Diversity & Literacy Development Research Group at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, she led a team that wrote an academic language curriculum for San Diego Unified School District, and then spent 3 years implementing this curriculum in the Houston Independent School District as well. She also helped lead the team that wrote the first grade curriculum currently in use in Boston Public Schools.  Before then, Joan was an elementary school teacher.

Souhail Salty (COO) has significant experience at the intersection of business and ed-tech with leadership roles in strategy, marketing, operations, and finance at rapidly growing education-technology startups such as GetSmarter (acquired by 2U) and McKinsey Academy. He began his career as a consultant at McKinsey where he focused on education and economic development work. He received his BS in Finance and Management from the Wharton School and MBA from MIT Sloan.

Christina Kelley (CPO) has extensive experience in software development and UX for products aimed at supporting young parents.  She previously lead the product and technology team at ivary which helps aspiring mothers understand and improve their health and fertility.  Before that she worked as a software developer at Ovia Health, a parenting-health app with millions of parent-users. Christina holds a BA in Psychology from Harvard University and an MSc in Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology.

We are currently participating in MIT's Delta V Accelerator, and have also been accepted into MassChallenge Boston Accelerator.

The primary organization we're partnering with in the near-term is the Acton-Boxborough school district.  We're conducting a pilot program in partnership with them this fall through which we'll provide our solution to nearly 400 families.  In the past we also conducted a smaller pilot program with them (30 families) during which we collected feedback on an earlier iteration on our solution, and they've since agreed to expand the pilot to 400 families.  They have been a trusted partner with which we've been able to co-create and collect feedback on our solution.

The long-term impact we provide for parents of young children (our target audience and beneficiaries) is a child that is more prepared to achieve social and academic success in and outside of school.

In the day-to-day, the real value we're providing for parents is validation that they are helping their child and developing a stronger connection with their child, that doesn't come at the expense of their busy day-to-day schedule.  We make it simple and delightful for them to teach their children.  

We are able to provide this value to parents through additional, personalized, conversation content that they receive on an ongoing basis.

Because of this value creation set-up we deliberately decide not to focus on schools in the near-term as the purchasers of our product.  Schools have a long sales cycle, complicated stakeholder set-up, and would typically require a more customized solution, with features not in the best interest of parents.

To provide the most access to parents, while ensuring we create the most value for parents in developing our product in the near-term, we engage in a "freemium" model (described in greater detail below) early on, with free content that all users can engage with regardless of income and the opportunity to upgrade to premium for additional features.

In the medium term, after establishing a strong foundation of parent users, making it easier for us to enter schools, we'll build out additional features that allow for schools to act as the buyer of our product for parents, described below.

We plan to begin making revenue before the end of the year, and so will need to raise money at the end of this year to give us additional runway over the next year.

Early on, we'll engage in a freemium subscription model, through which we provide free conversation content for parents everyday, and then allow for users to upgrade to a $59.99 annual plan for additional features (e.g., assessment and personalized content, additional content and sharing features, ability to add more children).

In addition to being aligned with our value proposition, this model allows us to provide immediate value for a broad population of users upfront, while still drawing income from users with more disposable income and need to help make us sustainable during this early stage.  In addition this model allows us to provide access to many parents at lower user-acquisition costs, while collecting free feedback from these users on what they engage with in app so that we can improve.

In the medium-term, we can treat early learning centers and schools as an intermediary buyer for the app.  Many public schools are uncertain how to allocate their Title 1 funds intended for family partnerships, despite being obligated to.  As a family service that benefits both schools and parents, we can license our app to schools and early learning centers, and be covered by Title 1 or and center budgets to allow us to access an even broader socioeconomic population of parents.

We believe Solve can be incredibly helpful by providing the platform and network that we need to i) source expertise to help us in answering questions we're still grappling with, ii) establish crucial partnerships that can be helpful in expanding our impact.

We're an early stage enterprise, but most important to us is that we achieve impact as effectively and quickly as possible.  This means we need to engage with the right experts, advisors, and, if possible, talent to continue to push our thinking:

In early education and parenting - to push us to make our content as effective yet digestible as possible, and to help us measure our outcomes systematically and effectively

In technology - to help us improve our assessment logic to make our content as personalized as possible

In user-centered design - to help us introduce the right experience and incentives to draw parents to action

In marketing - to help us manage our cost of acquisition so that we can scale our impact effectively

Linked to the above, we need effective partnerships, specifically in the realm of distribution, to help give us access to the most in-need parent populations.  We describe this in more depth in the question that follows.

Finally, given that we are still an early stage venture, we also would benefit greatly from the financial support Solve offers, and the investments we are able to make in people and distribution as a result.

Near term, our goal is to partner with organizations across two categories: distribution, and complementary offerings.

Distribution: We hope to partner with organizations that would help us build parent awareness and give parents everyday solutions for building their children's reading skills, while limiting costs. These partners could include: early care center operators, who would be trusted influencers to tens of thousands of parents at a wide range of settings; media partners like ThriveGlobal or Motherly, which have wide readership among parents, and can help facilitate an awareness campaign around parents' specific roles and how they could easily "up" their daily interactions with our help.

But most importantly, we want to find partners that can help sponsor and facilitate delivery of our solution to underserved parent populations. This cohort deserves a tested product (thus the next-stage plan) and a well-supported product, at no cost. That means we need either large school networks or family partnership organizations/foundations to help us bring a tailored versions of the app to all types of families.

Complementary offerings: We are always seeking to make our product better as it relates to helping parents help their children, and that might mean working and integrating with other offerings that intend to do the same. For example, we would love to at some point embed an early dyslexia or special needs assessment within our app, and to do this we would need to partner with the right company or research body.