Since committing full-time to Kidola in January 2021, the co-founders have successfully taken their startup to the next level. They caught up with Silicon Luxembourg to discuss their evolution, the hurdles they had to overcome and what’s in store for 2022.
Started as a side-project to improve communication between parents and nursery caretakers, Kidola has quickly turned into a real company with big ambitions.
While the startup initially aimed at giving parents more information about their children while they were at daycare, co-founders Quentin de Madre, Jonathan Kindermans and Simon Lelorrain quickly realised “that parents always wanted more information and that this could become a burden for the educators.”
Throughout the process of onboarding new daycares in Luxembourg and Belgium – Kidola signed on 100 daycares in a year and has 30,000 daily views – the co-founders talked to the caretakers and nursery managers to learn about their respective pain points. Determined to create a platform that would help parents, educators and managers alike, the co-founders created an app that centralises the most relevant information for all three profiles.
Whereas parents receive a daily summary with pictures about their child’s activities, educators can use the app to get a clear overview of the daily schedule and keep track of each child’s progress. Managers get a “global overview of the business” where they can check their capacity, occupancy rate and get reports to optimise the latter.
“Kidola is not here to interfere with human interactions but to simplify nursery workers’ jobs and give the parents some peace of mind.”
Quentin de Madre
Beating Paper
Daycare centres have been slow to digitalise, especially in Luxembourg. While many French daycare centres have been using third-party software for some of their work, Luxembourg has stuck to pen and paper.
“Our biggest competitor has definitely been paper, so we needed to make sure we were at least as easy to use as paper,” says Quentin.
While the co-founders note that many nurseries were initially reluctant to change their ways, fearing a time-consuming learning process or digital interference, all daycares who tried Kidola so far have stuck with it.
Being in constant contact with nurseries and their staff about what functionalities they can add to make their lives easier has no doubt helped in this regard. As Quentin says, “Kidola is not here to interfere with human interactions but to simplify nursery workers’ jobs and give the parents some peace of mind.”
By promising to keep the time spent on Kidola at a minimum for caretakers and helping managers cut down the time they spend on administrative tasks, Kidola has achieved an impressive conversion rate of 65-75%.
When it comes to 2022, Kidola has big ambitions. A summer fundraising round of 600K, opening an additional 400 crèches by the end of the year, exploring new markets and adding more functionalities are all on the list. Given their recent trajectory, they stand a good chance of achieving those goals.
