Founder Story: BeFamily by Gavin

Today, let's explore BeFamily, a smart assistant app that's simplifying life for families. Managing a family's schedule can be hectic, with everyone's activities, appointments, and tasks often colliding.

BeFamily tackles this challenge head-on by allowing family members to merge their individual digital calendars into one unified platform. This means everyone can see each other's schedules and collaborate effortlessly on plans, events, and daily tasks.

The app doesn't just stop at scheduling. It extends its functionality to managing shared lists, routines, and activities, ensuring that all family members are on the same page.

Whether it’s coordinating soccer practices, scheduling doctor's appointments, or planning a family vacation, BeFamily makes these processes seamless and stress-free.

Lets Explore the journey of BeFamily.

Hi, my name is Gavin, I initially worked at federal agencies in the intelligence community where I had a side hustle developing my own company called Acuity Scheduling. Acuity was an online appointment scheduling platform that I initially built to help my mom, a massage therapist.

The side hustle eventually became full-time and by 2019 Squarespace acquired my company for $50 million. After some time off, the entrepreneurial bug bit me again and I have since founded BeFamily.

BeFamily works by helping families share and reducing the work needed for them to run. This is done in the three main areas that are essential for families to align and communicate: calendar, tasks, and long-term planning.

The app works best when a family member downloads the app and once registered, invites other family members to the shared space.

With everyone and everything in one central place then work can be shared, communication simplified, and BeFamily can even provide smart insights to run a smoother family.

Each member can then sync their calendars of choice from options such as Google Calendar, Office 365, Apple iCloud, and Calendar (ICS) so that when all members log in to the app, they see a calendar populated with events from all of the disparate, synced calendars shared in one place.

Events can also be added natively within the app, along with lists, tasks and plans that are shared with all the family members.

BeFamily, founded by Gavin, a seasoned entrepreneur with a background in federal intelligence and tech innovation, is set to transform how families manage their daily lives.

This smart assistant app was born out of Gavin's desire to alleviate the workload often placed disproportionately within family units.

By integrating tools like shared calendars, task lists, and long-term planning into one streamlined platform, BeFamily enables seamless communication and collaboration among family members.

The app addresses a common pain point in family management: the uneven distribution of household responsibilities and the frequent miscommunication that arises from disjointed scheduling and planning.

By allowing family members to sync their personal calendars and share tasks effortlessly, BeFamily makes it possible for everyone to participate equally in managing household duties and plans.

Since its inception, BeFamily has focused on enhancing user retention by refining its features and utilizing smart notifications to keep users engaged.

Initial user acquisition strategies included targeted Google banner ads and newsletters, which proved effective alongside efforts to improve the app's daily usability.

Moving forward, BeFamily plans to incorporate more AI-driven features to further assist families in managing their routines, suggesting that the future of family organization lies in predictive and proactive technology that makes daily logistics smoother and family time more meaningful.

BeFamily was created to address the real problem families have when they are trying to organize their lives, beyond scheduling matters. Typically, family work is unevenly shared between partners, as one family member almost always handles more of the load than the others - and even then, families operate archaically.

BeFamily solves this by providing the tools through its smart assistant, tools that remove gatekeeping issues which improve communication and in turn allows families to share more of the work and reduce the mental load of running a family.

All member’s schedules/tasks/plans are shared by default on the app, which makes space for partners to see what each other are doing, possibly help out on more tasks, and collaborate.

B2C products like BeFamily cannot grow by paid marketing alone. Looking at the top B2C profitable apps in the app store, none rely on paid marketing.

However, we’ve seen great success initially with Google banner ads (something myself from 5 years ago would never have dreamed of saying) and newsletters for acquiring users.

Prior to investing in acquisition we spent a significant effort working on retention, which primarily is around making a product that people enjoy using every day (and don’t forget about).

Our two main tactics for this were filling gaps in features & push notifications to pull people back in.

Finally, the hope is to snowball off of this initial paid acquisition and into more product lead growth through features, like collaboration, that are more valuable when others you know are invited.

Traction is easy if everyone who signs up sticks around, then it’s just an acquisition issue which has plenty of options if you’re making money. Getting someone to stick around, even if they say they love your product, is a whole lot harder.

Retention has been the biggest hurdle to traction, specifically solving 21-day retention. We found retention in early days (<7) the easiest to impact with nudges, like push notifications and emails, but those didn’t work by day 21.

For BeFamily to achieve this we needed to develop a new habit through nudges (push and email) and rewards (streaks that lead to a reward).

Those were not quite enough though, more impactful was filling product needs that increased usage frequency like adding shopping lists and meal planning.

Efficiency really isn’t valued in our startup culture. It’s way too easy to participate in startup theater, and feel really good about yourself while working horribly inefficiently.

There are so many coaches, meetups, networking events, conferences, and more to help with nearly anything in your startup. You’ll meet plenty of people who can help, and spend hours learning new ideas, but it’s a waste of time for many founders.

The most common question I hear other founders ask when we meet, essentially, “how many employees do you have?”.

It’s rare to hear discussions that result in real value for customers, and instead most push people to reward themselves on performing activities and achieving artificial side effects of growth (like hiring employees).

All of this ends up with early stage startups wasting valuable time that could be used to solve hard customer problems to instead be spent on the theater of running a startup.

My last company was purely bootstrapped and I took absolutely no money at all and saw the creative freedom it gave me.

I’m open to investors in the future, however, as the only major negative to bootstrapping is the lack of acceleration a founder may need for growth at inflection points.

Until I see BeFamily at an inflection point, it will remain 100% personally funded.

BeFamily has developed incredible tools to bring together everything needed to make your family run smoothly. That’s the start, and we achieved it ahead of schedule.

Having everything needed to manage your family in one place starts to unlock the ability for us to help you get more done.

By knowing the tasks you need to do, what’s coming up for the week for your family, and everything around your life we’re able to proactively recommend actions and also help with insights to help you need to think less about logistics and be more present with your family.

Everything is growth. In the early stages (and possibly even later ones) if you can’t draw a direct line to how what you’re working on connects to growth then it’s not worth doing.

I feel much more focused now and I see more results knowing this. Before I mistook customer happiness as the main success, and that’s only one of many factors.