Monday, December 4, 2017
Interview With HopSkipDrive's Joanna McFarland
If you're a busy, working parent, it's a huge battle having to shuttle your kids to and from school and activities and holding down a normal workday at your job. How can you manage to do both? If you are in Los Angeles, Orange County, or the Bay Area, Los Angeles-based HopSkipDriv e runs a service which uses certified caregivers to offload the shuttling of kids between those activities. The company recently raised a new funding round from Student Transportation Inc. (STI), FirstMark Capital, Upfront Ventures, Skyview Capital and Halogen Ventures. We caught up with CEO and co-founder Joanna McFarland to learn about where the company is and how it's scaling its service--any why its service makes such a big impact for families with working parents.
For those who aren't already familiar with HopSkipDrive, talk about what the service is doing today?
Joanna McFarland: HopSkipDrive is a ride service for kids. We help busy families get kids to where they need to go, safely, dependably and with very highly vetted drivers. We call them care drivers, because they are caregivers first, and drivers second. We started after my two partners and I, all working moms, with 8 kids between us at five different schools, and 20 different activities, really saw how many people were struggling with this. We started this really to solve our own problem. From the beginning, it was all about our kids, and what would it take to put kids in those cars. Our service is designed from ground up with that level of safety in mind.
Let's talk about the new funding round. What you will be doing with the new funding?
Joanna McFarland: We did a strategic funding round, led by Student Transportation Inc., as well as our existing investors, plus a few new ones. Student Transportation inc. is the third largest school bus company. We're really excited to partner with them and for them to make that investment, because while we help thousands of families across LA, Orange County, and the Bay Area, more and more we're partnering with schools and other organizations to help them with their transportation needs. We're providing innovative ridesharing and carpooling solutions to them. This is a really great opportunity to partner with Student Transportation Inc. to provide a full suite of transportation solutions to the K-12 set. Sometimes a school needs a school bus to get sixty kids from point A to point B. But often times, a bus is a third empty. That becomes very expensive for everybody. If you just need to get 10 kids or 20 kids to and from school, we can be a great solution for that. That's why we're really excited about building out our partnerships with schools, and having the funding to continue to build out our product, for development, hiring, and investment, and also to expand. That's part of where the partnership with STI comes in, we can sue that partnership to really think about where to expand to next.
What has been your strategy for extending geographic reach of the service?
Joanna McFarland: We started in LA, and we're an LA-based company. We now cover all of LA, and pretty much all of LA county. We started expanding to Orange County a year and a half ago, and we also expanded in the Bay Area shortly thereafter. We're in three different geographies now. Being an LA-based company has really been great, because for a business like ours, LA really looks like a big collection of different neighborhoods. We've been learning how to expand neighborhood-by-neighborhood here, which helps us understand how to expand elsewhere.
For those neighborhoods, what are you looking at?
Joanna McFarland: We're looking at the mix of schools in those neighborhoods, and the family makeup there, and the potential for care drivers in those neighborhoods. We're a flexible income opportunity for what are primarily women drivers. 99 percent of our drivers are women. This is an income opportunity for them which they can do part-time, and also stay very local. This works very nicely from that perspective.
We've heard of people using Uber for this, what are your thoughts about that?
Joanna McFarland: Uber and Lyft, per their terms of service, is not for anyone under 18. Anyone using those services for someone under 18 is really a violation of those terms. We think we're really offering a very different service. We are specifically designed for kids, and we put our care drivers through a fifteen point certification process to be on the platform. Every single one of our drivers has been fingerprinted and has at least five years of child care experience. We meet every one of our care drivers in person. We do a lot more than the average family does to vet their nanny or a babbysitter. We also have a lot of safety features built into our system. We have custom ride notes, so that if HopSkipDrive needs to take your kids to karate, we'll actually go into a school, find the kids in after care, sign him off, and walk him to the car. Because he's only nine, we'll have a booster seat ready for him. These are the kinds of services that are specifically designed with kids in mind. Those specific elements that we do, and those safety features, is what has led us to work directly with schools. That's enabled us to have a pilot program with the LA County Office of Education, where we are driving foster kids and helping foster kids get back and forth from their school of origin.
It's been a few years since you started, what's the biggest lesson you've learned so far in this market?
Joanna McFarland: We learn a new lesson every single day. The biggest lesson, is we are continuing to learn. We're always learning, we're always getting feedback, and we're always using that to make improvements and to continue to make adjustments to the service. One of the things that we have learned is that what we are providing is so desperately needed. We hear from the thousands of families that use us to get to and from school every day, to get to tutoring, or to dance, or to soccer. We literally hear from those families every day about how this has changed their lives. They tell us, this has enabled me to get a promotion at work, because I'm not having to leave work early every day to pick up the kids. It's enabled a son to make the traveling team, because he's been able to get to practice every day. We've heard from another mom, that because of you, my daughter has been able to get the help she needs at a specialized tutoring program. When we first started this, we thought we were stepping into something big, and we've now found it's really something massive which crosses all families, whether their kids go to public school, private school, or charter schools. Families want what's best for their kids, but they are busier than ever, and those logistics are really hard.
We often run into people who wish they could use your service, but are outside your service area. How do they figure out when you'll expand to where they are?
Joanna McFarland: We have wait lists in multiple cities across the country. You can go sign up and get on HopSkipDrive, and that really helps inform us of where to go next. We look at how big of a wait list we have in various markets. You can have all of your friends come in and sign up, and that lets us know that they're waiting for us.
What's biggest thing we should look out for in the next few months?
Joanna McFarland: We're going to continue to put out some pretty exciting product announcements, specifically on the school side. We are hoping to really make a difference with our pilot program with LA County and foster youth, and we're looking to take that beyond and really help multiple counties and cities and states comply with ESSA regulations, the Every Student Succeeds Act, particularly for foster youth and their school of origin.
Thanks, and good luck!