hey everyone welcome back to talk tech with tiff today i sat down with melissa who is the
co-founder of the app pockpock we got into what it was really like transitioning from working a nine
to five into co-founding a company what an app really entails to find users and how to go about
that some of the challenges it brings and so much more this was a very valuable conversation and i
hope you enjoyed it as much as i do also i have linked down below my newsletter which contains
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okay let's get started welcome to my new series called talk tech with tiff where i am sitting down
with industry professionals to hear about their career journeys and current roles i created this
series to hear from people who are established in the tech industry so that we can all learn
what these individuals do in their day-to-day jobs and the type of opportunities that are out there
okay let's get started hi melissa how are you i'm good how are you i'm doing good i can't
complain it's a gorgeous saturday so it's always nice it is it's beautiful day well i was really
excited to sit down and speak with you especially about your company poc poc but before we get into
it tell me a little bit about yourself and your background sure yeah thank you for having me again
so my background's kind of crazy i love that i i fell into tech in in a very serendipitous way
and my career started in germany actually where i used to live and i was working at a small fashion
startup there when i met a woman at a bus stop and then ended up working at the walt disney company
so yeah i spent a good chunk of my career at disney as a product designer for baby and
toddler products um not in the tech space but in the physical product space and then i moved back
to toronto and got into tech i started working at a startup here in marketing and then ended up um
starting pockpock after that so it's been kind of a whirlwind i've had many different types of jobs
i think that's always the best though because through each one you gain so much experience
absolutely going back to i love how you two just like it was so casual like and then i just started
a company and you know pogba and it's doing great and but what was it kind of taking a step
well actually before i ask you that let's talk a little bit about for those who aren't familiar
with pockpock what it is sure yes that's probably pretty important so um is an edtech startup based
here in toronto and we're really on a mission to help raise the next generation of kids to be
creative out of the box thinkers through digital play so our first product is called
pockpock playroom it's a preschool app for kids two to six years old and it's essentially just
a digital playroom filled with open-ended toys that spark imagination and creativity and learning
through open-ended play wow that's amazing how did how did this i mean how did this concept
uh or idea initially come to you so i i can't take full credit to be honest so my co-founder esther
and her husband matthias they had just given birth to their second son and already had a two-year-old
at home and they were starting to look around for technological options for their two-year-old to
play with that would be not only entertaining and stimulating but also really educational and
self-guided because they they thought you know if we're going to give our child screen time we want
it to be a moment that we can take for ourselves as parents and not have to sit there and be part
of it and when they started looking around the app store they found nothing other than very highly
overstimulating and addictive video games that weren't really designed properly for young kids or
more pedagogical style apps that are really focused on having kids memorize and regurgitate
information like the abcs the 123s and all those things that are very valuable but
there was this huge missing piece in the middle which is what about creative learning what about
imagination and empowering kids to think outside of the box and problem solve and
develop social emotional skills and kind of all that awesome stuff that happens like on the
floor of a messy playroom in your house why didn't that exist in a digital space and so they started
creating something on their own on the weekends which was going to be a digital storybook with
no language so um just like some images that you could tap and they would animate and make a sound
and that's when i had the pleasure of meeting them and we started talking a lot more about this
sort of big problem that they had in their own household and putting that into a bigger context
of how you know our kids are going to grow up to have jobs that haven't even been invented yet and
so many of the jobs that say you and i have today could be taken over by ai or other types of tech
so we were like how do we equip our kids for the future and there are so many important skills that
kids will learn in the classroom but we really wanted to focus on those life skills because
technology right now can't think creatively so that's something that's innately human we
want to really focus on fostering so we decided to start the company to really
try to do that so bring technology into children's lives in a really mindful and healthy way
but with the intention of really sparking their creative thinking i love that and and like you
said it was such a gap in the market prior to pockpot coming around that uh it's amazing to
see how how quickly it's just taken on like you know i know congratulations by the way
i know you just raised three million dollars to continue to expand so that's thank you huge going
back to your early days uh you mentioned prior to pogba you were working for a company here
what was it like it's scary leaving you know that comfort and having that job what was it like
that transition for you it's a good question i think i grew up in a very entrepreneurial
household and my brother is the co-founder of snowman which is another toronto-based
creative studio so the apple doesn't fall far but um so i i definitely was afraid but i knew that
you know at first i saw my brother could do it i was like if he could do it i could do it yeah yeah
we're very competitive um no but more seriously i think you know it's it's terrifying because
not only do you lose the comfort of of a of a stable job but you also take on the weight of of
a company and i think that's something that you know you you can't just get away from so i knew
that it was going to be not only transitioning my entire day-to-day in terms of what i was doing for
my job but also my life so just thinking about a nine-to-five job like that doesn't exist for me
anymore and i do i i don't stop thinking about pock pockets yeah for better or for worse yeah
i think that was a big scary thing was to really accept like okay this is now my job is going to
become my life whereas before my job was just part of my life and um there's no company i'd
rather do that with in pockpock because it's something i'm really passionate about but
i think starting your own company um it's no joke in the sense that like it's gonna take over
your life probably in many ways at least at the beginning and while work-life balance is
super important to me and i try my best to to to stay healthy in that sense um
yeah it's hard to get away from so it was it was scary but yeah yeah so far so good exactly
and it's one of those things that you have to if you're making that leap you really have to
believe in and be passionate about what you're doing because like you said it's
your whole life especially at the beginning it is absolutely and there's also the learning curve
of going from doing one job in a company and being part of a bigger organization and being
somewhat of a cog in a machine to building that machine yeah so it's a very different skill set
and just takes a lot of a lot of um resilience i think because you fail so much so it's a lot of um
you know support is really important kind of speaking about that with failure and finding
support did you have moments especially when you were starting out but when you're like i'm not
able to do this i'm not equipped to do this like kind of almost imposter syndrome and how did you
navigate that oh of course i think people who who say that they don't have that are lying i don't
agree i agree um yeah absolutely there's so many things that i've done for the very first time with
pockpock so i had a lot of moments where i was wavering and wondering like can i really do this
and what if i screw up or it's not just me i have a whole team of people and we aster and i and like
all of our co-founders we really care a lot about them so it's a lot of responsibility to make sure
that they're all so happy and i think that that's um that's just a big deal and how do i overcome it
resilience like my i learned many years ago that nobody really knows what they're doing in life
and everyone's kind of faking it until they make it so i just looked around and was like okay if
that person can do it i can do it why why not what's the difference like there literally is
no difference i'm the only one getting in my way because if a friend came to me or my brother came
and said hey like i'm not sure i can do this or we're having challenges with the business
um it would be a no-brainer for me to be like of course you can do this like why can't you you're
the perfect person to do it so i really just started to look in the mirror and realize like
give like take your own advice melissa and some days it's easier to do that than others but having
a good support system is really crucial and i'm very lucky to have amazing co-founders who um you
know we were there for each other we we try not to you know have our meltdowns at the same time
no i'm just joking but scheduled in like my mouth runs on monday yours can be on tuesday yes no just
trying to be there for each other and and frankly we haven't had a lot of crises we're very lucky
to um you know be heading on the right path so that's great i i completely resonate when you said
if they can do this why can't i because that's been my my motto in my my head throughout all
my journey as well and it's so true i always just think well why can't i do it then you know and it
really helps break it down in a less intimidating way absolutely i totally agree with you
i think we have a tendency as humans to assume that everybody else in the room is really
confident and knows knows what they're doing and feels good in their own skin and is really well
equipped for whatever task is at hand but i think you'll find that that's not generally the case in
in every situation and so um yeah it's reassuring to know that other people have doubts and concerns
and feelings like that and just remembering you know you're not in it alone like let's just try
to help each other out figure it out together yeah exactly going back to the early days of pockpock
what was some of the biggest challenges for me and maybe this isn't one but for me when i think of uh
apps i think finding users would be a very big challenge was that one of them or what were
some of the biggest ones yeah finding users is definitely not easy especially for us because our
user is not our customer so our users are two to six year old so we don't advertise to them
and frankly we can't really speak to them directly in most situations so we're talking to the parents
yeah our customers and that has been a really cool and interesting challenge for us when we launched
we didn't do any marketing we just did pr which i just did on my own and we were only now starting
to invest in marketing a year after launch and so visibility on the app store is a huge
factor in the success of an app and so we're very lucky that apple likes pockpock
and we won an apple design award last june which um thank you which was incredible and insane and
that really helped boost our visibility on the app store because once you're an
apple design award winner you're bundled into a lot of features and and different like lists
and groups and you get a lot of press and all of that really helped kind of push us forward because
it was just two weeks after we'd launched wow so that was a huge help for us and then
i would say also just balancing out the needs of the kids with the needs of the business so for us
like our number one priority is how do we serve kids best yes if that means our company's gonna
go under then it's gonna go under because like we we care so much about the kids and we want to make
sure we're not cutting corners and we're building the business for them but we also have a team
that we have to pay we have an office we have to pay rent for and and frankly we're we're here to
make money as well so i think just always keeping that in track and making sure that our creative
decisions come first but that the business follows very close behind and that we're doing things
that are going to set us up for success in the future because ultimately we want to stick around
for a long time and our whole mission is to become like the pixar of play and to do that we need time
so to to get time we need money to get money we need users so it's a very um cyclical process and
so that's always been a little bit of a challenge is balancing those two things but um i think so
far we've been doing a really good job and we've been super fortunate that families love potpock so
much because screen time as you know is a tricky subject in many households totally understandably
and as a parent myself like i completely understand why and but you know for us seeing that
parents don't feel guilty about screen time and are actually evangelizing pogba for us among their
friends and other parent communities that's huge and so that's been a really big help for us in
terms of growing that is and to really have this past year not done to just do more of the pr site
but not even done the official marketing side as you said like i can't even imagine what the next
six months next year is going to look for pockpock thank you i hope so we have some amazing new folks
on the team who are very busy um trying to to help really focus on these areas now which were
super excited for because the more people we have playing pogba the more feedback we get
and the better the product gets so that that's a really important detail as well it is and it's an
interesting challenge uh or interesting thing you mentioned about you're not marketing of
course to your end user i never thought of that before but that's such an interesting thing to
navigate really it is it's very it's very fun and very unique for sure and it gives us a lot of cool
opportunities because on the one hand like we we want to talk to the kids as much as we can
because toddlers don't lie like if you see if you hand them a toy to test and they don't like it
they're just gonna hand the ipad back to me like i hate this yeah it's true or they might even say
anything they'll just walk away and go place with some lego um and so that tells us so so much so we
want to always try to get through the path to them and we have to go through their parents of course
and they're the one paying for pogba so we need to make sure that they're feeling comfortable
with it and they feel that there's value in there for their child so it's really fun we
get to talk to a lot of awesome families that's amazing and like you said it's it you talk to one
family and they they start using it they love it then it's word of mouth it just trickles really
it's trickling yes very quickly i'm sure there is so much uh ahead i know there's so much ahead
for pogba but is there uh things that are ahead that you can share with us today yeah so we're
going to be continuing to update the playroom very regularly which we already do about every four to
six weeks um playroom is a subscription so we want to make sure that there's a ton of value there
and also for kids you know they're never they never stop being curious so we want to make sure
that there's always something new to discover so that's a really um exciting part of what's to come
we have a lot of new updates coming i can share that we have we'll actually won next week which
is a marble run which i think is a really awesome sort of stem focused toy we spent a lot of time
actually here at the ontario science center doing research because there's a life life-size massive
marble machine i don't know if you've ever been there no i haven't seen that you definitely have
to go it's amazing um and then we're doing a big space update later this year and we have a lot of
what we're creating comes from the user so they'll ask for something and then we try to think about
how we can bring that into the playroom and then play room aside you know we're really starting to
think about how we continue to develop innovative digital toys for older kids as well because when
the kids turn six or seven and they start to age out of playroom we want to be there to
bring them an experience that's just as open-ended and creative and empowering as the playroom but
with a little bit more depth and challenge because they'll be a little bit older so
we're starting to think about those next products as well which will also all be app based so it's
a little kind of sneak peek as to what might be to come and yeah just trying to get pock
pock in the hands of more families i think is a really big focus for us because we haven't really
spent a lot of time doing that we've really been product obsessed for the last couple of years and
spent the first year post launch really focusing on that so lots to come for lots to come it's
very exciting things i i could i feel like i could sit with you for a long time continuing to ask you
questions around pogba and your journey because it's just so inspiring but to to really end the
conversation i asked this to everyone which is what advice would you give to your younger self
it's a really good question i asked this to my husband this morning actually and he had a
good answer too but i would say that i would tell myself to stop worrying and really just let what
everybody else thinks go and just follow your gut because there's been so many times in my career
and in my life where i've been too concerned with how i'm perceived or too concerned with
um if what i'm doing feels right and if i should trust my instincts but i've learned
like just screw it just do whatever you want life is short and you have to trust yourself because
you're the only one who knows you the best so i think that's a huge thing and then also just to
remember that um you know like like we were talking about before that everybody
is going through something and everybody's trying their best and if you feel like [ __ ] one day i
don't know if i can say that you might have to bleep me out no um but if you feel like crap
one day you can remember like everybody has bad days and don't let that get you down and just
follow your heart because we spend most of our lives working so you have to love what you do i
totally agree i feel like i really needed all that advice personally right now so thank you
melissa it was so great sitting down today to chat with you about pockpock and your journey
thank you for being here thank you for having me it was such a pleasure thank you amazing cool