Parenting Platform

NEED:
I have been thinking lately that I would love to read books on parenting from the perspective of the parent and the son/daughter. Obviously this will require for the son/daughter to be of certain age to be able to bring a clear perspective. I am starting to think that even though each child is different there should be a book that could serve as a guide to how to motivate our children depending on personalities. I know that no child is equal and everybody have different personality. Nevertheless I feel that someone could try to summarize them in 2, 5, 10 personalities and write a book about how to motivate kids with similar personalities.

DESCRIPTION
This is probably a crowdsource platform. A platform that can guide parents in this difficult path of parenting. The platform basically uses the information from thousands of learning lessons from parent-child pairs. 

POTENTIAL
Difficult to assess but how many parents are they in the world?

The App that helps parents educate their children

[Update: April 2013]

I should have updated this post long time ago. Just a month after my post Agnitus launched its App Trailer. I recently found out about this App (currently on the Apple AppStore) and I am thrilled about its capabilities. My 2-year old daughter is using it every other day and I can see her progress on the scorecard.

Another game studio that has a promising product is Mapache Studios. Mapache Studios is an Edutainment Media Company that develops games for mobile education. They use the game mechanics of the most popular games such as Angry Birds and Cut the Rope to make extremely fun and engaging games.

[Originally Posted: May 2012]

Need:

Parents nowadays do not have the time to learn how to educate their children. In the best cases they may have the time but are sometime clueless about the latest tools or techniques to educate their children. In the worse scenario (and in most cases) do not have the time to research or be efficient about where to focus on their children education. Parents leave a lot of the education to the daycare or school.

Description:

Similar to the market that you can find in Brazil with the famous learning systems (or Sistemas de Encino), we can create a Sistema de encino for parents in an app for all tablets. This learning system will have different parts. It will have the level of detail for the parent to understand what are the key milestone for children of different ages. It will have what type of exercises is (or should be) doing his/her child at school given age (and maybe other variables). It will have what type of exercises should be doing at home given the previous information (how long the child should do the exercise and ways to make it fun and engaging). Finally, it will recommend other apps that can help with engaging the child into doing the exercises. The idea is that the app makes the parent a better teacher, depending on the type of child and the type of parent.

Potential:

Probably do not charge for the app, give some content for free and then start charging for extensive or additional content. Let's assume that the parents ends up finding the app so useful that they buys the content for every age stage. Let assume that the app provides stages from 1-5 years old (and maybe older) and charges for each stage $20 (less than a good textbook). That means that a parent may spent $100. Multiply that by the number of parents that can be millions depending on the success of the app. This easily can become a billion dollar market.

The Kickstarter for Kids Education

[UPDATE: JAN 2013]

Since I posted my idea I saw this very interesting commercial from Dodge trying to sell cars through something like a wedding registry (How to Change Buying Cars Forever). I thought that it was pretty innovative. If a car can be sold using this method, ANYTHING CAN. I like UrGift.in even more.

[Originally Posted: Jun 2011]

NEED: 

Parents keep getting too many toys for their children. So many toys that the children end up not playing with them because they are overwhelmed with choices. Friends and Family keep giving parents toys for their children because that is the best gift option (i.e. the chance of choosing a gift being that a toy that the children wont like is almost null). A solution that some parents have opted for is to keep some toys unwrapped so they can be re-gifted later.

Another incredible need that parents suffer from is the raising price of education. Parents have started to invest more and more on education funds to be able to afford higher education for their children when they grow up.

DESCRIPTION: 

Create a website for parents that can work like a wedding registry. Instead of being for a wedding this website would be for the child´s future education. Each parent can personalize what he/she wants to include in the wishlist but it would be divided in low ticket items (i.e. books for freshmen year) so any Family member or Friend can give whatever amount of money they want to. The money will go towards an account managed by an asset manager that would promise some type of return. The website can be tied to a mobile app that can make it more social so, for example, when grandma wants to give her grandson something, the app will remind her that there is a better option for her grandson: His future education. I am sure I can build on this idea by adding some gamification to the equation plus some incentives from the asset manager, etc., but I am sure you get the idea. It can even work like Kickstarter where there are very low ticket options (e.g. $1) so you can tap into the gift card industry and steal some share from that market too)

ATTRACTIVENESS: 

The business model is pretty simple. We will charge a fee to the asset manager for bringing money to the table. The Gifting Industry is difficult to size as people purchase stuff without necessarily telling you what would be the use for it. Some sources value the gift industry in the US as a whole at over $300 billion. I am sure even if we take a very small piece of this pie and multiply it by a 1% fee to the asset manager you still make several million dollars.