Why is applying to Bay Area preschools so painful? If KidAdmit has its way, it won’t be for long.

Startup Portrait #4: KidAdmit

Startup Portraits is an ongoing series of visual stories about the founders of Bay Area startups, their visions, and what they’re learning. More info here. In mid-March I met with the KidAdmit team at their office in San Francisco’s SOMA neighborhood, where I spoke with Tejal Shah and Parth Shah, KidAdmit’s co-founders (and cousins-in-law). Learn more about KidAdmit: Website, AngelList.

Jackson: What does KidAdmit make?

Tejal: We help parents and school administrators manage the preschool admissions process. We take away the headache factor for schools, so they can focus on the human factor of getting to know families better. For parents, we take away the headache of the application process so they can focus on the heart factor of getting to know the school.

The KidAdmit team, from left: Rich Combs, design, Parth Shah, technical co-founder; Nicole Gear, marketing; Tejal Shah, co-founder and CEO; and Nick Weinberg, engineering.

Jackson: Can you give more detail on what parents and schools go through currently?

Tejal: We’re replacing the paper application enrollment process. We help schools clearly communicate with their parents so they can spend more time with their students, and less time pushing paper.

Parth: There’s a lot of stuff that happens around the application process that is not well documented. We’re trying to optimize the process and help both parents and school administrators get organized. For example, we send deadline reminders so parents don’t have to try to keep track of as many things.

Tejal: And we make it actionable. As a parent, you can apply with peace of mind and do everything through KidAdmit. As a school, you can manage your entire process and spend more time with the things that really matter. We’re taking care of the paperwork so people can focus on the relationships. Yes, we’re technology based, but the technology isn’t there to put a barrier between parents and schools — it’s to remove the paper part, which is what really creates those barriers.

The day I met with the KidAdmit team was also the day many of them met each other. Until early March, the company was staffed just by its co-founders, Tejal and Parth; when I showed up, three new faces were in the office. True to startup style, everything happened fast: hands were shaken, excitement shared, and then, in a flash, Rich, center, split for the airport. Destination? NYC, from where he’ll work remotely.

And then there were four. With half an hour until a meeting with a preschool, Tejal and Parth race through a list of on-boarding logistics. Nicole and Nick’s company computers won’t arrive for another few days. The team discusses the work they can do in the meantime.

Jackson: What’s the most delightful experience a parent can have with the product?

Tejal: I think the most delightful experience for parents is when they realize they can stop doing the mundane paperwork and spend time doing what they really want. As parents, we have this constant to-do list in our heads, which can make us feel overwhelmed, but KidAdmit declutters your brain and makes you feel accomplished. We help parents feel more clear about what the next steps are. Schools can spend more time in the classroom, or talking to parents.

Parth: A lot of times, when you ask people about getting into preschool, they talk about “Oh, the admissions process is so complicated!” We want to get to the stage where people don’t have to worry about it. It should just work. We want to shift the conversation and decisions onto teaching philosophy and choice, and away from paperwork.

CAPTIONS:

Top left: Nicole pulls a KidAdmit teeshirt from her new-hire swag bag. It’s a small gesture with a big message: She’s in.

Top Right: KidAdmit works from a small office suite in a building shared by a number of startups and creative firms. The space is dominated by a huge common area, which gets flooded with natural light in the afternoons.

Bottom Left: Walking to lunch. Conveniently for team members in the South Bay, the office is across the street from the Caltrain station.

Bottom Right: Tejal and I leave the rest of the team at The Creamery, a lunch institution among SOMA startups. We have 20 minutes to get to a meeting in Russian Hill.

Jackson: There are a lot of people in the startup world that put a big emphasis on founders solving problems they’ve experienced themselves. Does this describe you, by chance?

Parth: Yes! Everything is personal. The entire product is based on our experience.

Tejal: I went through the cumbersome, laborious paper process four years ago with my first son. Because a lot of schools didn’t even have websites, I didn’t know what all of my options were. I had to buy physical guidebooks, but they never had all the information. One of the things we do is we make sure all the licensed facilities are listed.

To give you a specific example, I remember once when I hand delivered an application, but when I called back to follow up, they had lost it! So we have a feature now that sends parents a confirmation when a school receives their application. But even more, the parent then gets another confirmation when someone actually clicks and opens their application. The parent gets notified that someone is looking. It keeps parents involved with the process and it’s less headache for schools, because now they don’t have to deal with hundreds of follow-up phone calls.

We’ve parked and now speed walk to the preschool, which we know is in an old victorian—though we’re not sure which. We walk in one direction until it feels like we’ve gone too far, then turn around, then find the place, but first the wrong door, then the right door. Success!

The Russian Hill School is a hidden oasis, and Tejal and Heather Piper, the director of admissions, make their way to the backyard/playground. They haven’t spoken in a bit and spend fifteen minutes catching up on the edge of the sandbox.

Tejal and Heather eventually make their way to Heather’s office, where they pull up KidAdmit on the computer. Tejal is curious about how some recent feature changes have impacted the school’s admissions workflow. But then suddenly they’re stuck—there’s a bug. Tejal is surprised and whips out her phone to call Parth. Heather is surprised too, but mostly because within two minutes, the bug is confirmed, logged, and set to be fixed within hours. It’s a refreshing touch of unanticipated service.

Jackson: I had heard about the difficulty of getting into schools well before I met you two. I’m curious, is this a problem that’s peculiar to San Francisco? Does it exist elsewhere? Why did you start in SF?

Tejal: There’s a lot of trickiness with urban environments. When you look outside of San Francisco to other major metropolitan areas, their whole issue is workflow. Every school has an enrollment process, and there’s a lot of paperwork. But if we put simple strategies in place, like KidAdmit, that help keep them organized, we free up the time that people so desperately want.

Parth: Parents are very tech savvy here in SF. The schools are exposed to that, so people are very open to us.

Jackson: Is there a behavior you’re trying to encourage that your users are resistant to?

Tejal: There is misconception about adding technology. Many people think it changes everything, that it makes it more complicated and takes up time. But that’s really not true. The difference between earlier solutions and ours is that we are really, really simple. That can only help people, even those who aren’t necessarily tech savvy. We don’t want to be seen as a company that puts a barrier between parents and schools forming connections—we want people to know that we help create more, stronger connections.

CAPTIONS:

Top Left: Tejal and Heather drop into the sunroom-turned-office of Bonnie McFadden, the owner of the Russian Hill School. Art projects abound.

Top Right: Topic of the day? Admissions. Here, Heather recalls a conversation with a family about choosing a preschool.

Bottom Left: Student art.

Bottom Right: A student air-hugs Heather.

Jackson: Have you ever been faced with a decision where data supported one option, but you chose another?

Tejal: That’s hard to answer, but it reminds me of some of the feedback we get. Everyone wants us to do ratings and reviews. But we have a very strong opinion to not include that on the platform. We found that when parents find the time to write a review, it’s either something really awesome or really horrid. You don’t get that bell curve anymore—you get the opposite.

Parth: We did some reading and looked at Yelp and some other sites. For example, if you don’t like a restaurant, you don’t go to it again—but that’s not the case with schools. It’s a lot more than just having a meal. We want parents to discover for themselves what makes a good fit. Even among parents who are our personal friends, we know that people can want very different things for their kids. It’s a really personal decision, and we want to encourage parents to figure out which teaching philosophy is best for their family.

After our visit to the Russian Hill School, Tejal and I head to the Dogpatch neighborhood to pick up her two sons from a play gym. As it goes, it’s a de facto social hour for parents, too. The crew is intimately familiar with KidAdmit—many of them were the company’s earliest users.

Twenty minutes in, Tejal’s husband Rahul joins her and the boys in the play area. We try (and fail) to take a family photo. Forget cameras—apparently there are walls to climb and balls to throw. Tejal is hesitant to involve her family’s story in the business of KidAdmit. She later explained to me how some investors initially dismissed the company as “a side project of some mom.” It’s a pernicious reaction, but one she’s largely overcome.

Jackson: What’s one thing you did right that, in retrospect, you almost didn’t do?

Parth: Initially we started building tools for parents. We created this portal where they could search and compare schools. But then we did more research and learned that we needed to be closing the application loop. That’s when we said, OK, what’s the MVP [Minimum Viable Product] for that? The next thing we know we’re focusing on schools, essentially building an entire CRM for them.

Jackson: Last question here. What kind of action do you want a reader to take after reading this? How can readers help?

Tejal: We’d like to get the word out that we’re not just another technology company. We really have a bigger purpose and bigger vision that helps an entire community. Education reform has a lot of attention right now, but change comes from the ground up. We’d like to get more schools on board. We’d like to find people who are champions of products like ours, who have an interest in their communities. People can email us at yourfriends@kidadmit.com.