Cubspot: come for the “EdTech SaaS marketplace” but stay for the opportunity to find camps and classes for your kids this summer. Cubspot is the brainchild of Rachael Shayne, a former brand manager for Nestle, The North Face, and Oakley. Over a bottle of wine she and her friends talked about how hard it was to find classes for their kids in the summer.
“We talked about how ridiculous it is that our kids seem to be constantly out of school and the torture of finding the best, right, camps and classes to nurture them in a way that allows parents to work and excel professionally,” she said. “Realizing how fractured the marketplace was, we knew we could automate the process using software.”
The company has raised $500,000 in seed and is looking at some solid traction in early betas. The key, said Shayne, is the focus on the parents and not the providers. While the providers have plenty of wonky places to post their offerings, no one wants to use them. By focusing on the parents and offering them a quick and easy way to pick a class or camp they give everyone a more streamlined and pleasant experience. As it stands, booking a camp is a pain.
“Even building better vertical software for providers will also help parents who universally despise the camp and classes booking process. Also, we have automated the provider on-boarding process allowing us to scale faster. Sadly, 34 million parents currently waste 1 billion hours per year planning all of this for their 61 million kids. Informal learning is a $52 billion market and growing. Cubspot unifies the experience for both parents and providers becoming the personal assistant they both need.”
Give that literally anything is better than the current method of “search Google for camp near you, talk to unhelpful person on phone, send in a check, hope it’s a good camp” I think this “EdTech SaaS marketplace” has some legs.