Winnie helps folks find household-pleasant locations, share their experiences

a new cellular app called Winnie is launching nowadays to make oldsters’ lives just a little more straightforward, through offering details about neighborhood child-pleasant locations, as well as detailing what sort of amenities for households a vicinity could have – like stroller get right of entry to, quiet areas to nurse, changing tables, restrooms, and extra. the speculation is to make going out with your teenagers much less irritating, whether you’re just operating errands round city or traveling to a brand new city.

the sort of helpful knowledge for folks isn’t accumulated in a structured method these days. certain, you could in finding important points written within the comments of Yelp opinions or Google business listings, however you’d need to read through each one to even understand if someone mentioned the precise info you’re involved in – like whether or not the restaurant’s toilet has a changing desk, for instance.

(I in my view keep in mind a particularly fun night time out when i found myself kneeling on a bathroom floor, seeking to trade my daughter’s diaper before she scooted off the mat. Winnie can have for sure helped then!)

The startup used to be co-founded via CEO Sara Mauskopf, who has worked in shopper expertise and product management at corporations including Postmates, Twitter, YouTube and Google; along with Anne k. Halsall, CPO, a product designer and developer also with expertise at Postmates and Google, in addition to Quora and Inkling.

both founders are parents themselves, who built the app out of their own non-public desires.

And for this reason we need a diversity of engineers creating tech companies, via the way – 20-yr old guys recent out of school would most certainly no longer create an app like Winnie.

As Mauskopf explains in a blog put up introducing Winnie, “…having a baby changed the best way I noticed the world round me. I used to be scared to move anywhere because I didn’t understand whether they’d have the correct facilities for me to handle my daughter, or whether we’d even be welcome there,” she says.

any person caught at residence with a new baby – and the power that comes with that – can relate.

the 2 founders teamed up and created Winnie in early 2016. The app has been working in an individual beta in San Francisco up until nowadays, which integrated round 400 testers.

At launch, Winnie bargains knowledge on over a hundred,000 places across the united states of america.

It helps you uncover locations to take the youngsters for enjoyable, like parks, playgrounds, and libraries; lists domestic-friendly restaurants that offer things like altering tables, children menus, and high chairs; and it helps you in finding the closest toilet, changing table, or position to nurse, amongst other issues.

Mauskopf says this knowledge comes from a mixture of sources. The place “metadata” (e.g. changing tables, etc.) has been entered manually and got here from the group actually calling and discovering locations themselves. meanwhile, different data comes from crowdsourcing.

oldsters can depart comments and tips within the software – aka “stories.” Plus, they may be able to “Scout” locations in Winnie that they need to include.

tales will enable parents to relate their non-public experiences with a spot, each excellent or bad, which provides the app a “Yelp for folks”-like appeal.

to a point Winnie appears most useful to new oldsters, however.

First-time oldsters are often petrified of seeking to navigate the arena with their baby, and Winnie can provide some reassurances that it’s going to be okay to leave the house. but even these whose kids have exited the diapers-and-potty-emergencies segment may in finding the app helpful, because it help you in finding fun places to take the children to your city that you could now not have recognized about.

of course, like any social app launching in as of late’s App store, Winnie will want to attain a crucial mass sooner than it’s truly helpful to a vast market.

Winnie is a free download on the iTunes App store, and will remain free, for probably the most phase, over time.

“at the moment the app is free and our large priority is constructing one thing that’s actually helpful to folks,” notes Mauskopf. “at some point there can be elements of the product that we can generate profits from, however the core product will always be free,” she says.

Winnie is a crew of 4 and backed by means of simplest a small “pre-seed” quantity of funding.

Let’s block commercials! (Why?)

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