Classic startup wisdom is to build a product that scratches your own itch. But what if that itch is not your own? There’s a new crop of founders building products to solve problems their parents are experiencing.
These founders are finding that Baby Boomers like their parents are underserved. AARP reports that in the 2001-2010 time frame, venture capital investment aimed at Baby Boomers was just $2 billion, a fraction of the total venture capital investment of $250.5 billion.
Perhaps even more importantly, the Boomer markets is generally less price-sensitive than younger generations. Boomers, for example, have two times the median income of Millennials, 15 times the net worth, and a 50 percent higher average monthly spend per household.
We talked with three Millennial founders who saw opportunities to develop products geared to an older generation.
Revel: Events to connect women over 50
Lisa Marrone, who co-founded Revel with business school friend Alexa Wahr, says she had an aha while working in venture capital. She was being pitched ideas all day, but they were all geared to Millennials. “This demographic was being ignored,” she said, referring to “olders.”
Raised in a family of strong women, she saw her mother wanting an outlet to connect with other women her age. Marrone says that even as someone in her mid-thirties this resonated—she’d recently moved to a new city and faced the problem of making new friends. Thus was born Revel, an events “marketplace” to connect women over 50.
Members can sign up for anything from a Revel-members-only spin class to an author book reading with discussion. During stay-at-home orders this spring, Revel has come up with clever ways to hold these events online. The website recently added a forum for discussion, too, another way to connect. Revel is currently in the San Francisco Bay Area, but Marrone says they intend to extend geographically at the end of 2020 into 2021, with interest in the Pacific Northwest, Washington, DC, and Connecticut.
How does a young team create a product they know will be relevant to another age group? Marrone says Revel conducts focus groups when developing new features. As an example, when ready to roll out the forum recently, they presented mockups to a small group of members for feedback, going back to the drawing board before releasing the final version. They also have community leads (members) who give feedback on messaging, and recently hired a head of community who is a Boomer.
What’s been surprising? Marrone says when pitching to enter YCombinator, an accelerator for early-stage companies, she and Wahr were asked how a tech product geared to older people could find a viable market, since this demographic doesn’t know how to buy things online. She laughs, telling the story, at the absurdity of the assumption.
Marrone has found an unexpected benefit of working with another generation, too. “If you asked me at the outset what my views of aging were, I’d say ‘scary decline.’ Now, seeing members who are amazing, it’s given me a more optimistic [view].”
Alz You Need – Matching caregivers with the right assistive technology
Leda Rosenthal, founder of Alz You Need, felt the problem her company solves quite personally. When her mother was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s, she knew there had to be some tech solutions to the daily care problems her family faced. She quickly learned it was challenging to find these products, and went on to found a company that would make it easier. While Alz You Need has evolved since she first launched the MVP in 2015, it is today a discovery tool that helps family caregivers (who are primarily Boomers) find the right tech tools for their caregiving.
The product offers two levels of service–one, a light, quick match that is free; the other a fee-based, more extensive match that is reviewed by humans. Rosenthal says this service can be challenging because it’s not a science. “What works for one family won’t work for another,” she says. She notes that there are also so many technologies and that the database is always changing.
The company does not receive affiliate or referral fees, remaining agnostic to serve clients. The company’s business model is based on fees. Rosenthal says, though, that she has found the older market they serve does not care about cost, especially since what they are purchasing is for loved ones.
Alz You Need remains a Millennial-run company, even incorporating Gen Z by tapping into college interns’ work. Rosenthal is Chicago-based but has used intern help from the University of California, Berkeley, as well as Colgate University. The company keeps an ear to the ground to stay on top of customer needs. Feedback from the market comes from follow-up done by NPS score, as well as surveys conducted via Survey Monkey.
What has surprised Rosenthal, though, is how tech-savvy older adults are: “We get a lot of information on what tech they have, and it’s amazing.”
Teeniors – Tech-savvy teens empowering seniors
Trish Lopez, founder of Teeniors, long had a desire to help young people assist seniors, but she was never quite sure how to do it. Then, during an exercise at a weekend event for women entrepreneurs, she suddenly had the idea for Teeniors—a service that connects digital-native teens to seniors who need help with technology. By the end of the weekend, she had created an MVP of sorts and won first place when pitching it to the event participants. That was 2015.
Since then, Teeniors has been hiring teens to work with older clients on their technology needs. Seniors’ requests can include anything from printing an airline boarding pass to getting set up on an iPad received as a gift. The company actually employs the teens, and the clients pay for the service, though Lopez’s generosity seems to make room for plenty of discounting based on need.
Ironically, the addition of a nonprofit arm of Teeniors has been a financial help, since it can accept grants. Companies like Comcast, HP and Facebook have been eager to team up with Teeniors. They recognized that the organization can help open up the senior market to their services and have approached Teeniors proactively, an enviable situation. Most nonprofits spend valuable resources writing and pitching grant proposals in order to receive funding. For Teeniors, Lopez has been able to write the grant request after the companies expressed interest. She reflects that if she’d had to proactively search, she’d not have had the time to run the company.
Like Revel, Teeniors is currently geographically focused–in Albuquerque, NM–but has its eye on growth. Lopez hopes to begin by expanding within the state, then perhaps beyond. An NPR piece in January brought Teeniors into the national spotlight, and Lopez has been happily overwhelmed by the volume of response. There has been interest in licensing Teeniors, and Lopez entertains this as a possibility, but one that will take time.
Teeniors is a business, but Lopez recounts numerous stories of how lives of both seniors and teens are changed by it— a senior in tears of gratitude at being helped by someone not yelling at them, or teens’ parents reporting their socially withdrawn children with newfound confidence thanks to the work. “The main service we provide is not tech support, but human connection,” says Lopez.