How do you deal with stress and anxiety? How do you project yourself and ActivityHero in the future? At the same time, we worked very closely with our customers, who are small businesses and were struggling to keep their companies alive too. What got us through this phase was empathy towards our employees and customers. Ultimately, this decision paid off as revenues started to pick up, and we could restore everyone to their normal schedule. We decided not to furlough or have layoffs because it would have impacted not only the employees but also our customers. Shilpa Dalmia: We had to cut expenses and reduce everyone’s hours in the early days of the pandemic since we suffered a huge dip in our revenues. Did you have to make difficult choices, and what are the lessons learned? Now our marketplace business has grown even faster than before the pandemic. While we really want to have kids be able to play, learn and hang out in person, the silver lining for us is that we are no longer constrained as a hyperlocal business - we can now sell to any family online. When shelter-in-place orders went into effect in March, and all kids classes and camps had to be cancelled, we helped teachers and small businesses start offering live online classes on Zoom. Shilpa Dalmia: Before the pandemic, ActivityHero was a marketplace for local in-person camps and classes. How the coronavirus pandemic affected your business, and how are you coping? In addition, all our employees are constantly giving us feedback based on their experience with the product or customers. Every product feature that we launch stems from the needs of activity providers and parents. Listening to customers’ needs is in the DNA of our company. Our core strength lies in our customers’ relationship – both activity providers running programs for kids and parents. The majority of our employees are parents themselves, so they live and breathe the problem we are trying to solve as a company. Shilpa Dalmia: We are a small team of highly motivated people. I immediately saw a lot of interest in this space and was connected to Peggy Chang, who shared this vision.
#Activity hero software
Being a software engineer, I decided to build a marketplace for kids’ classes and camps. The only option was word-of-mouth or mommy groups. While there was Yelp for restaurants, marketplaces like Expedia and Airbnb for travel, there was nothing to find and research kids’ programs. Shilpa Dalmia: Being a working mom and first-generation immigrant in this country, finding after school programs and summer camps for my kids was very challenging. We now go on more family road trips than ever before! Tell us about you, your career, how you founded ActivityHero. Overall as a family, there is some amount of anxiety, but it has also helped bring us closer together.
They have both had their own sets of challenges. We have 2 teenagers in the house – a freshman in college and a sophomore in high school. My husband and I work in high tech companies, so switching to working from home was quite seamless for us. Shilpa Dalmia: COVID-19 has certainly changed what normal looks like for our family. First of all, how are you and your family doing in these COVID-19 times?
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