‣ Company: Maple
‣ Founders: Michael Perry and Mike Taylor
‣ Mission: To make all parents’ lives easier
‣ App launched: 2021
‣ Team size: 9
‣ Go-to emoji: 🤙🏼

Soon after becoming a dad, Michael Perry realized that technology makes so many jobs easier, except the most important one: parenting.

“Our family is our life’s work,” says Perry, the cofounder of Maple, a family-management app that helps households conquer chaos via shared calendars, to-do lists, weekly meal plans, and an AI-powered personal assistant.

We chatted with Perry about parenting problems, what it takes to be a truly great founder, and where Maple goes from here.

What inspired you to create Maple?
As new parents, my wife and I started looking for better tools to keep it together, and the lack of options impacted us. Many households are made up of dual working parents with kids doing extracurricular activities, so we needed to design an experience powerful enough to support this world. For example, our newest product, Family Email, allows for shared “read” and “seen” states, and it incorporates AI to handle inbox management. Members can also access documents in a shared inbox, rather than a separate one.

How does Maple help solve the unique challenges associated with managing a family?
Maple was built with the primary goal of making it easy to work together on anything your family needs to get done. You might be doing two things at once, like your meal plan and grocery shopping list. You might be sitting at one of your kid’s sports practices and getting an email about something else for a different kid that requires looking at their calendar and your partner’s calendar. It’s about using one app versus two.

How do you go about prioritizing features?
Our greatest insights come from talking to parents. We have a Slack group with more than 100 parents with different channels, and I try to have a coffee meeting with users once a week. There are also things no one asked for, like email that we built because family email is fragmented. With our AI-powered inbox, we’re setting up email importing so I can connect my personal email, which then becomes a shared family inbox in Maple that my wife can access.

What’s a real example of a family using the app in an unexpected way?
We’ve had schools reach out because parents will start a shared folder with another parent, and then there’s a whole classroom using Maple. People use it for whole soccer teams. You may not even have kids—we’ve heard about roommates using it.

How does Maple handle a common point of failure: people not regularly checking the app?
We leverage push notifications for events, to-do reminders, and tasks, and do as much marketing and nudging as possible to remind people not to get off track with their family. By using Maple, somebody is making an investment to share responsibilities at home. It says something about who they are. We can’t force anybody to come back. They have to have the desire to be there for their family.

Maple is a part of the App Store Small Business Program. If you are a developer and would like to learn more about the program, follow the link below.