3 Things: Childproofing as a Service, Retirement Navigator, Metrics Benchmarking
Happy Sunday and a very warm welcome to all the new subscribers! I’m thrilled and honored to have you as readers and truly appreciate your thoughts and feedback 🙏. Each edition of 3 Things will contain a dive into 3 rabbit holes I’ve found myself going down recently. Subscribe to get each week’s edition straight to your inbox and if you enjoy it, please share (I suck at self-promotions so can use your help)! This past week I’ve been thinking a lot about:
Childproofing as a Service
Retirement Navigator
Metrics Benchmarking
1. Childproofing as a Service
As a new parent, I’m now learning how many things in a house are absolutely not safe for a small child. I knew that you have to use baby gates on stairs when a kid starts crawling and walking and that you should put covers on electrical outlets, but I had no idea that pretty much everything can be a hazard when a little one becomes mobile and curious. Apparently, a child goes to the ER every 46 minutes due to furniture falling on them! This is mostly due to kids pulling themselves up on it or using drawers as steps to climb on and in the age of cheaper, lighter, ready-to-assemble furniture, I’d imagine this number will only increase.
There are literally dozens upon dozens of items in every babyproofing checklist covering each room of the house. Things like stove knob covers and cabinet locks for cleaning supplies in the kitchen or removing window blind cords to prevent strangulation would not have been immediately on my radar. Since almost every new parent gets their car seat installation checked by a professional (which honestly is not that complicated), wouldn’t it make sense to leave childproofing an entire house to people who know what they’re doing? A company can offer childproofing as a service with options for DIY where they send out a person to check everything and give you peace of mind, to full-service where they send employees to do all of the childproofing for you, including getting all of the necessary items like outlet covers, gates, locks and more. The company could also sell their own brand of babyproofing and child safety products that can be both part of the initial sale as well as future upsells as children hit different milestone or families have new safety needs.
2. Retirement Navigator
The average lifespan of a person in the US has continued to rise from just 48 years in 1900 to nearly 79 years as of 2020. When Social Security was created in 1935, the Full Retirement Age (FRA), the age when workers can first claim full Social Security retired-worker benefits, was set at 65 (you can technically claim benefits at 62 but they are significantly reduced). In that year, the average lifespan was only 60.7 years so people had extremely short retirements if any at all. In 1983, legislation was created to raise the FRA to 67 over the course of 22 years becoming fully enacted in 2022. The FRA increased only 2 years while the average lifespan increased a whopping 18 years meaning millions of people now experience significantly longer retirements, often still with good health and energy. Many studies have shown that retirees who do not have activities to engage them during retirement experience higher levels of depression. It’s also been shown that one of the most important things for longevity and health is maintaining close social relationships.
As 71 million Baby Boomers and 65 million Gen Xers hit retirement, many are still looking for ways to stay stimulated, learn new skills, engage with their community, and volunteer or participate in philanthropic endeavors. You can only play so many rounds or golf or read so many books, right? Humans are creatures of habit so going from years of doing basically the same routine over and over to finding new ways to occupy time and feel fulfilled is a daunting task. We are now at the point where most people who are nearing retirement or recently retired are comfortable with smartphones and the internet so there is an opportunity to create a digital Retirement Navigator service that helps people map out how they want to spend their retirement and then match them with local services, opportunities, clubs, and more. Starting in certain geos with a high number of healthy, affluent, Baby Boomers/GenXers, the company can also offer their own in person experiences similar to the dating site Events and Adventures, ranging from cooking classes to speaker series to hiking excursions in addition to guiding them to 3rd parties. It would be a subscription business model with an upfront cost to match you with a Navigator and help you plan (like a financial advisor) and then ongoing you would have access to their in-house experiences as well as continually updated 3rd party opportunities.
3. Metrics Benchmarking
The metrics that companies measure continue to get more and more robust and also more complex. As the amount of first and third party data being collected increases exponentially, companies are buying tools and hiring teams to makes sense of it and use it to help move the needle on the metrics that matter to their business. While ARR and LTV are important, there are plenty of more nuanced metrics like sales efficiency, cohort retention, or compounding monthly growth rate — all dependent on business model (B2B enterprise, bottoms-up SaaS, B2C subscription, B2C transactional, etc) that need to be closely tracked and improved.
For each type of businesses model, there are certain north star metrics that the team and investors care about measuring. The problem is, most people are continually at a loss when it comes to the question “what is good for X metric for Y type of company”? In addition, when it comes to fundraising, there is an ever-changing bar that investors are looking for startups to reach for each stage and an investor needs to be able to compare one company to their peers. A data company could collect and monitor real-time data points on thousands of startups across different industries and stages to provide benchmarking data on all kinds of metrics. You’d filter down by industry, business model, and then metric and it would show a range and identify what top quartile, average, and bottom quartile look like at that point in time, very similar to compensation data platforms like Option Impact or new entrants Pave or Pequity . It could be a give-to-get model where startups provide their metrics and get access to the database for free, helping them benchmark against similar companies and identify the areas they need to focus on. The company could charge VC firms for access to help inform investment decisions and also help guide their portfolio companies.
That’s all for today! If you have thoughts, comments, or want to get in touch, find me on Twitter at @ezelby and if you enjoyed this, please subscribe and share with a friend or two!
~ Elaine