Family Nest Network

Parents lose their work social network when they go on parental leave from work. Family Nest Network arranges catch ups with other working parents to make real connections with similar work ethic.

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Inspiration

As a working mother, I have gone through having a huge social network at work, then the social network disappearing when I wen on parental leave. Trying to find other parents to find support was difficult - turns out parents have a vast range of lifestyles. I fit in best with the working parents. Our career is our jobs, but our life outside of work now includes a child. Employers have difficulty managing parental leave, and providing "enough" support without reminding the parent of their looming deadlines upon return. The peer support from other working parents has been invaluable. There are practical tips shared from experience such as how to arrange childcare to return to work and how to express and store milk at work, as well as the emotional support. We are better workers and parents because we support each other. The difficulty was in finding each other. The catch up for a coffee is great, but someone also needs to arrange it. We can use AI to find each other and to arrange our catch ups for us.

I also extend this app to all parents, not just mothers (some workplaces offer parental leave to all parents). A key indicator of workplace support for parents is in how much leave the father (or non-birth parent) receives, as this can cause hostility when a mother does take leave. Beyond that, post-partum mothers and children need care, and the father is in usually in the best position to provide such care, often doing this without the support of other fathers. We need to break down this barrier to allow men to be real fathers. Having a supportive home life is only going to benefit them in the workplace.

I've included a sponsors page because many services and hospitality venues want business from working parents - they have money to spend on luxuries like barista coffee, and will need paid support like childcare when returning to work. The parents using the app are their target market, and having Fynn tailoring introductions to these services when the parents require them is a benefit to both business and parent.

What it does

Family Nest Network uses a conversational AI, Fynn, to learn about the parents, then find compatible parents to initiate group chats and real world catch ups. These group chats can be with the most compatible parent, or it could be with a random parent who happens to be online. These real world catch ups would be initiated with something like inviting 10 users to a sponsoring cafe tomorrow. Even if only 5 parents turn up, each have potentially made 4 new friends and the cafe now has 5 new customers.

How we built it

The front end is 90% bolt commands. The back end is a maybe 50% commands and a lot of fiddling with supabase (and I'm still not sure it's connected properly.) I suspect this is also affecting the Elevenlabs connection. Fynn, the conversational AI, is built with Elevenlabs.

Challenges we ran into

Supabase (and Elevenlabs) connection. The backend needs more work.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I've found a way to make like a Tinder for parents that doesn't feel like it objectifies the parents. The user isn't swiping and judging based on profile pictures and bio. Fynn takes the judgement shaming out of it.

What we learned

I'm really impressed with ElevenLabs and their conversational AI. The conversation algorithms have come a long way since I last looked at them. I would love to use it in future projects.

Reasonably impressed with Bolt for front end.

What's next for Family Nest Network

I would like to review the back end structure, like the data engineering side. There is much room for improvement there. I'll probably rebuild it in Bolt.

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