Activity Rocket gets kids into enrichment programs

If you’ve ever had that moment where you’re wondering what to do with your kid after school, or over a summer, you’ve faced a problem that our next entrepreneur solved. Lisa Friedlander is founder of Activity Rocket, a great story of how an entrepreneurial team starts a business to solve a problem that they care about, and, using some friends’ money and a lot of hard work, grows a substantial business.

ABERMAN:  Tell our listeners a little bit about Activity Rocket.

FRIEDLANDER: Activity Rocket is like an Expedia, or OpenTable for kids’ classes, camps, and sports. And, as you mentioned, it was solved out of a mother’s problem. My co-founder, Ileen Miller and I, two local moms, ex-attorneys struggling with young kids, to find the right after-school activities. The summer camp disaster, trying to fill eight weeks during the summer. And one morning, we met to discuss what was going in our lives, and I was spending three hours looking for a gymnastics class on a Tuesday between twelve and three, and that’s all that mattered.

My daughter was three at the time, I gave her cookie, she’d follow me anywhere. And Ileen had just spent ten minutes on Expedia, had booked an entire family vacation to New York. And this is several years ago, when Expedia and OpenTable had just started to become ubiquitous, and it was like a light bulb went off. We went, why is that not being done with kids’ enrichment? So, as attorneys, we did our due diligence, and were surprised to find no one was doing that. Hence, the beginning of Activity Rocket.

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ABERMAN: What were some of the big challenges that you had overcome to get your business to the point where—and we’ll talk with this in a moment—you’re able to combine with a larger business and achieve scale?

FRIEDLANDER: Where should we start on our list of problems? I suppose, as any first time entrepreneur, so Aileen and I, as mentioned, were attorneys, never ran a business before, certainly no technology background whatsoever. So, it was a little naive, probably a good thing, because otherwise, we wouldn’t have gotten started. But we were so passionate about the idea of solving this issue that was so problematic for so many of our constituencies, our moms, the people that we talk to every day. Dads, too, don’t want to leave them out, and we knew that with the rise of the internet that everything was about to change.

ABERMAN: How did you find the resources for your business?

FRIEDLANDER: So, we started small, spent a lot of time on a business plan, spent a lot of time talking to both sides of our marketplace. Parents on the one side, and activity vendors on the other. Spent a lot of time sourcing our network here in the D.C. area, and really that was of the great surprises of the entrepreneurship journey, realizing the network that you had and the people, how willing they were to sit down with you, give you their opinion, sometimes lots of conflicting opinions, and that was a struggle as well.

But I would say, primarily, the biggest difficulty was starting an online business without any previous technology experience or business experience. So, there was a lot to learn. We’re super scrappy, super persistent, and really, at the end of the day, we were just really passionate about the idea, and we knew that it was going to take off. Literally, Activity Rocket, no pun intended. But we knew that, if we didn’t do this, somebody would.

ABERMAN: In this town, a lot of people say that you can’t get from where you were, to where you are now, without venture capital, but you didn’t get venture capital. How did you acquire the resources to grow your business out without it?

FRIEDLANDER: We bootstrapped, initially. We each put in a small sum of money, went the completely startup methodology, minimum viable product. We built a beta product using a local engineer in Virginia, just something to test the concept. I would say, within about six months, we knew we were really onto something. We did a small, friends-and-family raise, got us to break even in terms of revenue on a smaller scale, but that was it. We did try to seek outside angel investors at the higher level, spent a little bit of time doing that.

We really weren’t getting anywhere, for a number of reasons that we’ve come to conclude. But then we just decided, you know, let’s just push on. Let’s just keep on growing the business. There’s a quote that sales is your best way of raising money, and we just decided to push forward, and figure out that, if we could do it right in D.C. Metro, even if we weren’t able to scale on our own, we would be in a great position to find somebody to partner with in order to take it national.

ABERMAN: And the reality is, when you look at the statistics, most businesses that are successful grow exactly the way you have. Venture capital, although we spend a lot of time talking about it as entrepreneurs, the reality is that most people grow their business exactly how you did—being scrappy and through revenue. You mentioned taking it to scale. You’ve now gotten the business in a position where you’ve merged with a larger company. So, how did that happen, why is that important?

FRIEDLANDER: About a year and a half ago, Ileen and I decided that we were ready to take that next step to scale, and we started sourcing different types of partners, nationally, some that were direct competitors, because by this time, they were were probably about a dozen competitors that had sprouted up over time. At first, this was a little bit of a dagger to the heart, but we quickly realized that competition was a good thing, and that it validated the market. So, there were about a dozen folks that we already knew about, some who had raised venture money.

So, we started off just making it a point of interest to speak to as many different people as we possibly could. Direct, indirect, anybody that we thought would align with the Activity Rocket mission to help kids find enrichment, and grow to be more independent, fantastic adults. In that journey, we found a company called Thrively, based on the West Coast, with a founder by the name of Girish Venkat, serial entrepreneur, probably one of the smartest people I’ve ever met. And this is his six or seventh company that he had the idea of for many years before, and the Thrively journey is a personalized education platform.

The notion is that every actor in a child’s life, whether it be a teacher, a parent, an enrichment provider, and then even into the workplace for older teens and young kids, that their journey would be based upon their strengths. No more cookie cutter approach to public education, no more cookie cutter approach to, I’m going to sign my kid up for sports and martial arts, because as a parent, I think that’s what they should be doing. The whole journey is personalized, from beginning to end.

ABERMAN: For people who are considering this journey, what’s the biggest lesson that you could share with them that was completely surprising to you?

FRIEDLANDER: A few things, actually. One of the things that was surprising was how difficult it was, and I guess that goes back to the naive comment. It’s good to be a little naive about just how hard it would be, and at the time, we didn’t fully understand this marketplace concept of building two sides, and simultaneously one having to feed off of the other. So, it’s not like you build the parent, and the business will come, or vice versa. They really have to be built up simultaneously, and you’re always struggling to maintain that balance. So, that was something that we really weren’t anticipating.

ABERMAN: What’s the biggest personal challenge that you had to overcome?

FRIEDLANDER: Being an entrepreneur, especially a first time female entrepreneur, there are a lot of challenges that you wouldn’t necessarily feel, or have to overcome, in an everyday sort of typical workplace job, or certain that I didn’t have to deal with as an attorney. There are a lot of ups and downs, it’s a real roller-coaster. And you hear that all the time, but until you actually go through it, you find that hard to believe.

Thankfully, I had an incredible co-founder in Ileen, we have a great marriage, and our skill sets really aligned magnificently, which is something that we didn’t necessarily know going into it. I think that’s what sustained us, over time, was being able to have honest conversations, go back and forth, defer to the other and their individual silos of expertise, and really sticking with it. Every time we hit a low, something would happen to make us realize we should keep going.

ABERMAN: Well, Lisa, I really appreciate you coming on and sharing your story with us. That’s another really positive story here in D.C. about a group of people that just got up and decided to solve a problem. Lisa Friedlander, co-founder of Activity Rocket. If you’re a parent, you better check it out.

FRIEDLANDER: Thank you.

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