It's a competitive world and there's no rest for the weary—even if you're just a kid.
Parents want their offspring to get the best after-school enrichment to ensure a smooth transition to the finer things in life. But organizing toddler Mandarin, a math tutor, baby yoga, or finger painting art classes is no easy task.
Stephanie Choi, then an exec at fashion startup Rent the Runway, decided there had to be a better solution when looking for music classes for Maddie, her 18-month-old daughter. So she joined forces with Rent the Runway colleague Marissa Alden to start Sawyer in in October 2015, an education marketplace intended to bring order and modernity to the world of after-school activities.
After raising $1.5 million and booking over 50,000 classes, Sawyer (inspired by Mark Twain's mini explorer, of course) is heading west to Los Angeles, where it launched last week. PCMag met Choi for tea at Au Fudge, an LA cafe owned in part by Jessica Biel—and an early Sawyer partner.
So, quick background: at Sawyer, you've taken what you did with fashion inventory management at Rent the Runway and built an ed-tech company managing Mini Mozart-style lessons inventory?
Right (laughs). My whole world is on my phone. I use digital tools to manage everything in my life from scheduling to communication, ordering food via Seamless, yoga drop-in classes via Mindbody, and ride-sharing car services like Juno. So I knew there had to be a better way to handle my daughter's after-school activities. I wasn't just looking into music classes, and other activities, I was also starting to plan pre-school and I was filling out forms and printing them out, writing checks, and I thought, "OMG, I'm going to be doing this for 18 years!" as my daughter grows up. I realized the "Personalized Education" EdTech market was so fragmented, it was ripe for a new business solution.
Through Sawyer, you've now made signing up for under-fives kickboxing lessons as easy as ordering sushi takeout. Parents can read the reviews, pay for everything directly via Sawyer, see what's available for last-minute local activities, and even schedule a full semester to enjoy a variety of drop-in classes. Sawyer syncs with a parent's Apple or Google Calendar and populates their schedule. But what's the sell for those running the after-school programs to sign up to Sawyer?
There are hundreds of thousands of small businesses in this space and, with the launch of Sawyer Tools [last] week, we've created a hyperlocal marketplace which allows our Educational Partners to grow their business efficiently, providing a seamless booking experience for customers, gain exposure to our network, showcase and market their activities and fill open spaces in their classes at discounted drop-in rates. Sawyer Tools also takes into account all the nuances of children's class management: family accounts with multiple children, sibling discounts, caregiver information, children's allergies, and so on. In return, we take a small percentage of each booking.
Can you talk about the business intelligence layer you're building in? It must be a growing source of predictive analysis for parents on the types of classes their child might like, as well as planning tools for providers.
Yes. We're still a small team of eight, based in an office in Brooklyn, but we built our web-based platform all in-house, on Ruby on Rails, so it's very flexible and being modified and improved on a constant basis. Through our small business intelligence tools, we're able to analyze everything [and] can help our Class Partners know where the best locations are to expand in their neighborhood, based on foot traffic, school locations, availability and matching activities. We can also tell them which areas are underserved in certain types of classes and even which ages are most popular to offer them for.
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You're launching Sawyer in Los Angeles this week. What's the story behind the expansion?
As we built out the software, we were very focused on NYC. But people started contacting us from elsewhere, including Au Fudge, who wanted us to help them manage their schedules for classes and activities. And suddenly we had several partners ready to go; it just made sense.
As the whole system is digitized, in the future, your household robot could probably handle the Sawyer scheduling if a few cousins are staying for the weekend and you need something for them to do?
(Laughs) Ha! I guess so. Whatever makes parents' lives easier. We're a technology-forward venture and ready for what's next.