HomeyLabs (Memphis, TN) – A start-up company from Slovenia, Europe joined Start Co’s summer accelerator program, Upstart, a cohort for women-led startups. Their iOS and Android mobile app – called Homey – gamifies household chores for families, motivates kids to do chores and enables easier chore management for parents. The team behind Homey decided to come to Memphis after they discovered the majority of their users come from the Mid South.
The app launched 5 months ago but the story began long before that. It started when the founders were living together as students. They had the same problem many families face: nobody was doing their chores!! And that’s where Homey began. Truth is, there is a demand. Right now, 61% of parents in the US pay allowance to their kids and 89% of them require their kids to work for money. With it clear that small rewards and recognition are great motivators for kids, their business idea was born. When the beta version launched, parents started reaching out to them and before long they had hundreds of families waiting in line to try Homey.
It’s getting hard to reach children with paper chore charts, especially since they spend so much time on their smartphones. But Homey is fun, motivating and social. Homey’s biggest advantage: it works with photos, so kids have to take a photo of each chore they do. The photos motivate kids to do a better work and but they also show parents what’s actually being done around the house.
Homey also connects chores to rewards, so that the kids or the whole family together can work towards the rewards the adults set – the reward could be anything; weekly allowance, screen time or a family trip to the zoo.
HomeyLabs was founded by Sanja Zepan and Saso Pompe. The couple has been together for eight years; that’s a lot of chores!! Sanja studied communication, with a focus on how modern families communicate. She works on marketing for Homey. Saso is a developer, former CTO, who studied business economics and marketing. They’ve both been involved in educational tech startups, and that’s where they met their two excellent developers – Sandi Mihelic and Vid Staric – who joined them last Summer.
The Homey team came to Memphis to talk to parents and kids already using their app and to try and grow their product more by making business partnerships and connections in this region.
If you want to try out if Homey app works for your family, you can download it on the App Store and Google Play, or you can visit their website at www.homeyapp.net. If you have any feedback about Homey, they would love to talk to you at feedback@homeyapp.net.
Sanja Zepan is the Co-founder and CMO of the Homey App