How This Millennial Co-Founded A Subscription-Based Edutainment App For Kids
Your kids' indecisiveness giving you grief? This app will fix things
By Terri Kue -
Imagine this: you've caved in and allowed your kid to start taking dance lessons. You pay for a whole semester's worth of classes upfront - as is the norm. But after two weeks, your little one says that they no longer want to continue attending sessions.
If you have children under 12 years old, the scenario we just described is probably one you are all too familiar with. Recently, though, an app has been launched that will help you with your kids' ever-changing interests. hop app is a subscription-based platform that allows your young ones to explore their interests. Most importantly, they can do it in a cost-effective way.
We talk to Germaine Tan, 27, co-founder of hop app, to find out how the app works; as well as how it came to be. And let us let you in on something: she created this app for parents without being one herself!
hop app is a one-stop mobile app solution for parents to book edutainment and enrichment classes for children aged zero to 12. The beauty of hop app is that it's a subscription-based model.
How it works is that: you sign up for a membership and get a certain number of credits. These credits are then used to book classes. We try to get a spread of many different kinds of service providers; there's arts; sports; fitness; dance; public speaking; and all of that. We even have coding and robotics, which are very big with kids these days.
If you're a parent with a child and you want them to just try one or two classes every month so they can experience something different, you can sign up for the lowest tier membership - the Starter Membership - which gives you enough for maybe a couple of classes a month. How you use the app is really up to your commitment level.
Since there are so many different classes to choose from, the kids can basically hop into any of these classes and see if they enjoy it before the parents commit to a semester of lessons.
It was back in 2019, and it really came out of nowhere. At the time, I was using an app called Class Pass and was thinking: you know, why not do something similar for kids; there was no app like that in Singapore at the time.
My next question was: is there a demand for an app like that? So I spoke to some parents. I actually did a small study in Singapore with about 150 parents back in 2021. I also did more of a qualitative study where I sat down with 20 different parents and talked in depth for an hour each just to understand their problems. I understood more about the demand and what parents needed.
A lot of parents that I've spoken to over the last few years would lament to me about how it's very hard to even manage their kids' schedule because they've got full-time jobs. Having to set them up for classes, find a school they trust, and find out if the kids even like the activity is a whole process.
I'm someone who has always been interested in tech and early childhood education. But I obviously had no background in app development. Back then, the market for app development in 2019 was very expensive. In 2021, I met an app developer who said they were just starting out as well and that they were interested in bringing this app to life.
Of course, I wanted to make the app as functional as possible for the parents. I would say we took about slightly less than a year from the very start. The first thing that we did was look at the visual design of the app; page by page, function by function. 'What's it going to look like? How does each page interact with the next?' That took us about three to four months.
The actual development then took us about another solid six months plus. Every week we were on calls and testing out the app on the phone. We had to ask ourselves: Okay, do we have to change this or move this up one inch or move this down?
And in terms of the functionality, I had to think through the psyche of both the partners using the app and the parents; what are they going to do when they are on the app? Does the app afford them the opportunity to do what they want?
As a full-time DJ, have you always wanted to try a business venture? How did you balance your time between your full-time job and creating hop app?
I think I've always wanted to do something; I felt that it was important for my own personal growth to embark on a business venture.
I used whatever off-time I had to meet the app developers, which would be on the weekends when I didn't work. So we would meet every weekend, sit down at a cafe, and go through everything. It was a vigorous process. It's definitely something that you have to dedicate time and effort to for week after week for a whole year. But I would say that the payoff is really worth it. And so far, everyone has been very supportive of the venture.
As someone who doesn't have any kids yourself, what was your goal behind creating the app?
My main goal of creating hop app is to help parents. I want to see that they have actually benefited positively from this app. I think it will take a while to see a big impact, but that's my main goal.
Other than that, I just want to learn and grow. I'm someone who's really afraid of failure. So even during the whole process of this business venture, I would second doubt myself. I would keep thinking: why am I doing this? I'm just going to fail.
However, getting over that hurdle and then actually launching the app brought a new wave of self-assurance for me. It's like... if you put your mind to it, there's nothing that you can't overcome.
Yes, definitely. We've had a few parents who use hop app who feel that it makes things easier for them. It's a direct booking system, whereas, in the past, many of them had to call the schools, email them, and even pay a physical visit if no one was replying. So with the whole system of hop app, you skip through that whole process.
We have some big plans over the next few years. For now, the next step is to actually onboard more partners and more users. So right now, we are reaching out to a lot of partners, and doing aggressive marketing as well to get users to come on.
But more than that, back before I even started developing the app, I remember one of my biggest goal - that is still in the pipeline - is to have a special category for special needs children. In the case where they may need specialised teachers, I want them to be able to use the app to find a match that would cater to the education that they need. So that's something that is definitely in the works for me, and I definitely want to achieve that in the next one or two years.
Absolutely. Usually people start businesses out of passion. I think my love for hop app doesn't just lie in early childhood education. Of course, I think that it's very important to not just focus on academic success when you're young. But my interest also lies in creating a business itself.
It boils down to the very simple things such as the tech and the app development. So I can't really tell you exactly what one thing my passion lies in. But so far, everything surrounding the process from app development to even the marketing, social media, and partnerships, all of these things help to make you a multifaceted person.
I think the biggest advice that I've heard from fellow business owners and entrepreneurs is to make sure you are financially stable before you embark on a business venture. I think a lot of people embark on a business venture hoping to make money off of it. However, you don't realise how much capital you actually need to run the business for a few years. For a lot of businesses, they don't even break even until the second year or third year, and they're not even profitable until much later on. So make sure that you are in a good place financially before you start on the business venture.
As for this second piece of advice, it's something I'm still trying to learn myself, which is to not be afraid to fail. It's tough for a lot of people because we live in a very Asian culture where nobody wants to fail. Obviously, everyone wants to succeed. But if you never try, honestly, you never know. If you do fail, at the end of the day, you have gained a multitude of other things from this venture. Then that ties back to being financially stable; can you afford to fail as well? So that's really the one thing that a lot of business owners have told me: make sure that you are in a good place financially.