Parent-Driven Youth Carpool

We all know that transportation is foundational to our lived experience here in the U.S., AND our ability to access opportunity. But today, school buses are being taken away all across the country and THIS is leading to even more congestion during the morning and evening rush hour commutes. Parents need help.

But more cars on the roads means bigger headaches for all commuters...whether you have kids or not. We're also putting more CO2 into the environment and that's not good for anyone.

Every year, American youth travel 43 billion miles creating 33 billion pounds of CO2. Equivalent to a year of emissions from 4 coal-fired power plants.

50% of these rides are car rides ranging between 2 miles and 3.6 miles. Another 36% are school bus rides (and again, buses are being taken away, leading to more car rides). 78% of parents are not completely satisfied with the flexibility of pick-up and/or drop-off.

In today's hybrid work environment, busy working parents are tasked with navigating their own schedules, and that of their active kids.  PiggyBack reduces unnecessary stress due to overlapping work-life and transportation responsibilities. We've built a safe and reliable incentivized carpool solution that enables people with children to use their time focused on something other than the drop-off / pick-up lines.

Link to Study of Health and Access to Youth Athletics

School Bus Challenges & Rising Absenteeism

We've created a carpool marketplace where busy parents can share rides. All of our driving parents pass a comprehensive background check. PiggyBack Network insures the driver, the passengers, and the vehicle. Our families are empowered to choose with whom they will share the rides.

We remove the hurdles of carpool reciprocity and fair-trade by allowing families to pay a low fee to request a ride. We then compensate the families who give the ride, creating an even exchange. Because they've already met and approved of each other, safety, reliability, and shared values are top of mind during each ride to school, activities, sports, and back home.

Link to Intro Video

Link to Why + Quick Demo

As we’ve been building PiggyBack Network, sharing our story of why now, and who benefits, it’s become more obvious to me that though we focus on racial, ethnic, or socioeconomic attributes to call a group “underserved”, the reality is that parents and caregivers in the U.S. as a collective group are not treated with the proper respect.

Here’s a story. Maternity leave is some kind of fabricated debate. School buses are being taken away from many communities. Having a family signals lack of “dedication” to the office. School choice also means justifying closing schools in some communities. The cost of youth sports, and their increased influence on future financial success is creating a barrier to entry. Public transportation is being diminished. There’s a misplaced and manufactured animosity between parents and educators – many of whom are both educator and parent, both of whom are caregivers. PiggyBack Network is focused on helping busy parents find like-minded families who share similar values.

Parents are spending too many hours driving kids around town.  We either sit traffic or parking lots, or we choose not to allow our kids to participate.  The problem is - access to the best schools, activities and sports for our children are dependent on household transportation options, and today’s options are not equitably available to all communities. The problem matters to us because we know that school, sports and activities are how kids become leaders in the future.  However, we can't always commit to driving to school, practice, and games all the time. So we may choose the lesser school, the closer team, miss meetings or me time, or tell the kids "sorry, you can't do that this season”.

Our impact on society is significant because youth transportation is a foundational experience.  We impact: student, family, household stress, office productivity, traffic patterns, equity, future talent pools, non-profits, school districts, personal budgets, and the recycling of dollars in the community, and every time we talk to someone new, they tell us a new way we'd positively impact their own life.

Link to Interview

People ask us, what sets us apart, what makes us special, why are we the right team for the job? The full answer takes many forms depending on the audience, but the short answer is, we know each other. We know our strengths, weaknesses, nuances, insecurities, blindspots, trigger points, and most importantly – we know each others commitment to excellence. This means that any incremental adversity we face while in business cannot be greater than the sum of what we’ve navigated over the course of 20 years. Resilience, trust, and wisdom are the qualities and values that we carry with us into any room, decision, or partnership – and these are the qualities that make PiggyBack Network an amazing company.

Ismael and I have been building relationships with people our entire lives. Trust is the social currency that powers our ability to acquire customers. We have established ourselves as reliable, dependable, socially-conscious partners, spouses and parents – who have a passion for creating change, resolving conflicts, and building solutions that unite groups of people.

We have partnerships with YMCA Chicago and Boston. Partnerships are how we plan to grow and scale nationally, with a focus on families who have to get the kids around town.  We also have a partnership with KIPP Charter School in Chicago. We officially launched September 2023.

We have 350 users signed up on the platform.  Our efforts have been to convert them to active paying customers.  Thus far we've executed 100 rides.  Our revenues are about $30 / month (though parents buy points in bulk).  We are running about 5 rides per week among our active families.  We've saved about 700 miles and 1500 hours. 

We've raised $450K from REG-CF (~300 community members around the country).  We've participated in VC Backed Accelerator and have won grants via pitch competitions and other programs. 

1. We are in the process of building a mobile application.  We've love supprot and guidance not only building the technical aspect, but with the design that takes into account the demographic, psychographic, and emotionally intelligence expectations of our target customers - busy parents who are not connected to their community but recognize that increasing responsibilities around getting kids around town is not sustainable. 

2. Culturally, we know that MIT (and Greater Boston, in general) is concentrated with educational institutions.  There is a cultural bias towards education and activity, and given that every city relies on car traffic (and that Boston continue to attract young families) congestion is certain to get worse.  We want to connect with policy makers - those connected to health, education, community, and transportation (which underpins all). 

3. Our growth strategy is tied to partnerships.  We know that Boston leads the nation in innovative strategies associated with community based initiatives.  Our goal is to be connected into the ecosystem of leaders who value equitable access to future opportunity for all communities nationwide, assuming they also have the access and influence to champion innovative ideas targeting the same.

A handful of organizations are tackling the challenge of youth transportation that families face. We set ourselves apart in three key areas. 

Sustainability: Our pricing model is structured to enable all parents to rely on PiggyBack Network for transportation regularly.  In this way, we want to be integrated into the daily lifestyle of the busy family with active kids going to school, after school, and weekend activities.

Business Model: Incentivized carpooling is a novel concept.  We’ve established a new type of insurance policy to cover our members. The traditional “rideshare” model has a template that many of our competitors are pivoting away from to be successful. We knew early on we didn't want to follow the "Uber Model".  We are trailblazers at this moment and are being recognized as such. 

Reliability: PiggyBack Network is available to every family nationwide where youth transportation is needed. From large metropolitan areas to rural towns, our marketplace is powered by the parents. Therefore, we can be a resource without the city density or district budget constraints that others in our space must contend with.

We are focused on youth transportation because we live in a car-based society. Transportation and mobility affects everyone, not just the people sitting in traffic, and pick up lines, and parking lots. Emissions and pollution are a concern for anyone sitting in a classroom or in their front yard, when cars start lining up (in some cases, an hour early) idling, running a/c or heat, reading, scrolling, napping or meeting without considering the consequences of their actions, or the alternative options available. We know parents who miss meetings, get the kids late, run red lights, bully other parents, and in general are at their limit trying to get their kids to school, sports and activities. And when our challenges are verbalized, the response we get in one way or another sounds like “if you can’t handle the responsibility, you shouldn’t have had kids.” Parents and caregivers should be prioritized in our society, instead they are underpaid, overworked, or consistently disrespected, PiggyBack Network empowers busy caregivers to support their family, their community, their office, and the future success of the each – by lowering the hurdle of transportation so that equitable access to future opportunity doesn’t require so much personal sacrifice.

We are building a rewards based carpool solution that incentivizes parents to participate.  We use the online platform to connect the community (similar to facebook or nextdoor), we use their route characteristics to identify matches (similar to the way bumble uses identity to suggest matches) and then we enable them to coordinate and share rides - the way people already do via text & shared calendars - but with a much broader and more diverse audience of trusted, like-minded community members who value safety above all other things.

❖ does not rely solely on communities with high median-income. (indicator: tracking zipcode)

❖ has a lower price point with broader footprint. (indicator: tracking price, scholarship (subsidy or charitable donation), and gross margin)

❖ appreciates that parents want to be involved. (indicator: tracking number of matches, number of shared rides)

❖ will not assign random drivers or pass risk to the child. (policy: we require parents to meet and approve of each other.  we are not assigning drivers.  parents are choosing their matched member)

❖ prioritizes the importance of investing in the community. (indicator: tracking participation rates, absenteeism, tardiness, user stories - example: we know a kid who Aced an entrance exam and his mom believes it was due to his ability to get home faster (to study) with PiggyBack Rides rather than public transit)

❖ focuses on building a strong network of families. (indicator: tracking number of people in activity based groups)

❖ invests in local businesses with Community Partnerships (indicator: tracking profit share dollars to organization that is origin or destination of shared rides, tracking number of partnerships)

We are building a web-based application (looking toward building a native mobile application in the near future) that allows people to match, meet and schedule shared rides.  We are built on AWS, nodejs, react/native, python, mongoDB.  We also use products from git, google, and stripe, to name a few.  Of course we use a variety of productivity development tools like trello, figma and mailchimp.  AI is/will be used for dynamic route matching along with pricing tiers. We use geo-spacial data for different features related to safety and notifications.  In the future we expect to implement the ability to capture behavioral data for advanced analytics. Our goal is to integrate seamlessly into the lives of busy parents, while also providing useful information to schools and other enrichment activities (mainly non-profits) to enable them to make better decisions that elevate the lived experience of the youth, parents, and surrounding community members.

2 fulltime (current)

3 contractors (current)

We have a very fluid and dynamic way of working as we manage financnes for the start-up.  We've had up to 10 people on our team working in different capacities from Legal & Finances to Sales & Marketing, Parent Ambassadors and photography and branding.

Ismael and I started thinking of PiggyBack Network in 2018. 

We started interviewing parents and writing code in 2019. 

We launched (prematurely) in 2020.

We started raising money in 2021. 

We matured via accelerators and networking throughout 2022

We launched again in 2023 and have been growing membership, partnerships, and professional networks.

Along our founder journey, we have learned that our story to business partner is quite unique, and sets us up for success. We’ve known each other since 1999. We were recruited by the same Coach – shout out to Don Dobes – to play football at Princeton University. We are both electrical engineers. We are both from Chicago (my Grandma lived around the corner from his childhood home). We have been teammates, roommates, classmates, coworkers, and world travelers. When it was time to start getting married and having kids families we supported each other. We’ve both been volunteers, mentors, teachers, and have provided transportation services to youth – having driven kids from school to home during our college summer breaks.

We're both professionals 20 years Data and AI expertise. We're also active parents, leaders in our communities, and committed to impact through education. Our team represents the brightest talent from across the country and each of us brings a unique perspective to sustainability, gender equality, education, and social impact. We are all passionate about equitable access to future opportunity.

Easy Answer: 

Carpool assumes that sometimes you need a ride, sometimes you drive. Parents who request a ride buy points on the platform and use those points to make the request. The driving parent earns points that can be used to make a request. Our business model is a on-demand pay-as-you-go B2C Marketplace.

Longer Answer: 

PiggyBack Points power our parent-driven carpool marketplace. When a PiggyBack Member requests a ride from their selected pool of matched families, they will buy points to reserve the ride.  When the ride is completed, the driving PiggyBack Member family will receive a portion of those points.  As earned points accumulate, they can be used to request a new ride or redeemed for gift cards to purchase gas, groceries, coffee, etc. We use the points-based system for two reasons:  1, to ensure that our drivers are incentivized by safety, community, and reliability, not money, and 2, to ensure that the network is available to all families: those who may never be able to reciprocate a shared ride, those who are giving rides already, and those in the middle – who can drive the kids sometimes, and need a ride for the kids sometimes.

Based on the routes we’ve seen driven thus far, many rides are within the 5 – 10 point range.  Most kids have short rides that take a lot of time (a 5-minute round trip to school with traffic and waiting can use up 60 minutes of our day).  We’ve found that most PiggyBack families are driving a route 3 or 4 times to earn enough points to request a ride using those earned points.  From a purchasing perspective, we’ve seen families purchase a few points each week, and some families are purchasing enough points to last them the month – given the regularity of the schedule of rides needed.

Easy Answer: Parents buying points will bring in money to fund our work. To date parents have purchased 628 points on the platform. However, as we go from 1+ to 10000+ customers, we've been raising investment capital.

Sputnik ATX Accelerator $100,000

Divinc Clean Energy Accelerator $5,000

Startupbootcamp Accelerator$15,000

Fifth Star Fund Fellowship $25,000

Seed at the Table REG-CF $180,000

Wefunder REG-CF $120,000

P33 Pitch $25,000

Our growth strategy is to partner with schools and youth organizations.  We are in the process of finalizing additional YMCA partnerships in major cities on the East Coast.  We are responding to opportunities presented by the School Bus Driver shortages across the country – specifically in Illinois, but we know the same is true in cities in New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Florida, California, and Ohio – as school leaders and parents from these affected communities have been calling us.  We continue to share the story of PiggyBack Network with national and international charter & private schools, non-profit organizations focused on equitable access to opportunity, and sports leagues that thrive on increased participation rates. As many parents are also employees, we’ve been conversing with corporate ESG leaders to discuss sustainability, productivity, and employee engagement.  Our growth strategy is to meet parents where they are and provide them a solution that makes the logistics of youth transportation a bit less stressful.