Today, Joy is coming out of stealth to provide personalized, guided support throughout parenthood — from caring for a newborn to supporting parents’ financial health, well-being and beyond. Founded by parenting and edtech startup leaders, Joy is built by a team who has very much been there when it comes to the ups and downs of parenting. They are now creating the service that they — and so many others — craved while navigating such a formative, vulnerable time. Joy is now available for anyone to get 24/7 parenting coaching and support: joy.co.
What Led Forerunner to Joy:
At Forerunner, we’re passionate about the concept of serving the traditional needs of non-traditional consumers.
We live in a society where consumers are increasingly dynamic, complex and diverse, with a wide mosaic of different views of success, life paths, careers and passions. But still, human needs are relatively predictable — everyone needs purpose, support, growth, and wellbeing — even if the way we fulfill these needs today looks different than it did in decades past. We see profound opportunities in reimagining and rebuilding these key life foundations to serve the wide set of modern consumers today — a thesis that led us to OURA, Atticus, Fay, and a range of companies reshaping SMB opportunities.
This theme also inspired our investments in the caregiving space, which is currently plagued by tremendous emotional and financial strife. There is no shortage of statistics that illustrate this strain: caregiving is the second most common reason why someone exits the workforce (after retirement), 80% of new parents struggle emotionally postpartum, and 30% say they are stressed all or most of the time.
The Consumer Demand and Market Opportunity:
Researchers estimate that the “new mom economy” stands at $46 billion, a mere slice of the $2.4 trillion spending power that US mothers account for — and a number that is growing fast as more Millennial women become mothers each year. That’s because new parents are up against new challenges from those of decades past, with an increase in new parents settling down away from their hometowns and outside support of their immediate families, and a record level of women in the workplace prioritizing careers alongside caregiving. Regardless of the circumstances, consumers find themselves in one of the most meaningful and entirely new life experiences when becoming new parents, all without much scalable and standardized support.
As a mother of two young kids myself, I’ve been there. I’ve panicked wondering if my baby was getting enough food, sat for hours on hold trying to get through to my pediatrician’s office weekend advice nurse, and have been up at 2am deep down the google rabbit hole only to become more worried about an issue I didn’t even know if I should worry about in the first place. I’ve craved an expert source of readily available, empathetic support to help me through these moments of need with guidance specific to my babies, my family, and my needs. Instead, like so many other families, I’ve pieced it together manually — stitching disparate services and referrals from friends in a hurry, and often shelling out hundreds or thousands for specialists over the course of my kids' earliest years.
How Joy is Meeting the Moment:
That’s why we were struck when we came across Joy, which is helping to solve this burden by building the essential companion guide for navigating and thriving through parenthood. It is the market’s only end-to-end digital parenting resources platform that intimately understands and adapts to families’ needs over time, delivering the right experts, advice, content, and recommendations just when you need it. In an increasingly active parenting tech market, we were specifically drawn to Joy because of how the company solves for the massive fragmentation issues in this space. Joy supports a breadth of key parenting dimensions: feeding, sleep, learning, financial planning, life insurance, discounts and rewards on gear, and even access to resources for childcare.
Joy’s initial product, Joy on Call, features 24/7 text-based access to a wide range of parent coaches and experts — from feeding and lactation specialists, sleep experts, and financial experts — ready to answer day-to-day questions like finding the best daycare for your child, setting up a will and buy life insurance, how to start solids and sleep train, plus how to get major savings on diapers and wipes, etc. In the coming years, Joy will expand further down the parenting life cycle to help toddlers, young children and beyond — building on the trusted relationship it forms with parents in the earliest, formative stages.
The company is helmed by a seasoned crew who has been through it, both as parents and as operators. The Co-founder and CEO Alan Chan is an experienced founder whose prior company successfully exited to Yahoo, and who has a deep understanding of the parenting category having tackled it for over five years. Alan’s Co-founder, Emily Greenberg, leads Joy’s brand and parent experience and was formerly leading content at Lovevery after several senior edtech roles (Higher Ground Education, Wonderschool, and more). Joining Emily and Alan is Charlie Carpenter, who brings technical and product leadership across range dimensions of consumer tech, including a company he founded that sold to Canon.
We believe there is a clear opportunity to build the essential companion guide to parents, supporting them across all their critical milestones, moments, and memories. And we believe that this is the right time, team and approach to take this on.