Jen started in the baby business 11 years ago. At the time, she had no babies of her own, and no immediate prospects for any. She just had a winning business plan to be the “Geek Squad” for car seats.  “I’m pretty sure “Seat Geek” was already taken, so “Tot Squad” became the place to get your car seat or stroller installed, repaired or cleaned”. By 2018, Tot Squad was generating cash flow through nationwide operations with Amazon.com and had a pilot kiosk inside BuyBuyBaby in NYC.

Just as Jen was contemplating expanding the pilot, BuyBuyBaby came to the table and proposed going big: expanding to 30 stores in 10 cities in the next 60 days. Jen was 9 months pregnant and needed to raise a Series A round at the same time. There was no way all those things were going to happen. For sure, the baby was going to be delivered. The other two were not as certain. But her team hit their goals for the expansion, and Tot Squad was on its way. 

When Jen returned from maternity leave, she realized that she needed more help to navigate parenthood. New moms need a lot of support, and these days there are gig workers who can fill that need, from lactation consulting to sleep consulting and other services that help modern families who often don’t have lots of or live near relatives that they can ask for help. She saw an opportunity to expand Tot Squad to offer more services by matching customers with service providers.

Thus, Tot Squad 2.0 was born (not the official name - officially, it’s still Tot Squad). Jen reached out to her network, which was extensive after 10 years of navigating the startup world in the baby sector. After meticulous research and many conversations with industry experts, Jen decided to sell the business. In January 2020 she had four offers to buy the existing business of Tot Squad - all except the car seat installation business which she wanted to keep. 

She was trading an existing business that she had built with her own hands and know-how, one that was thriving and growing, for a budding marketplace business and the capital to start a whole new company. This one would be a tech company, which presented a totally different set of challenges. Instead of hiring hourly workers and training them to do physical labor of car seat cleaning, she would be hiring tech workers, building MVPs and managing sprints. The proceeds from the sale of the existing car seat cleaning and repair business to BabyQuip would fund the new startup.

Unless COVID blew the whole thing up. By early March 2020, Jen was wearing a path on her tile floor trying to get the deal to close. Her buyer was a strategic partner: they were big in baby gear rentals in the travel sector: amusement parks and vacation rentals. There was a lot of uncertainty in the travel sector right on the heels of a global pandemic. Her board called her and said, “Do whatever it takes to close this deal this week.” 

It closed, and the new Tot Squad was funded and cleared to pursue its marketplace business: matching providers of consulting services to new moms. And, Tot Squad had some aces in the hole. Jen had lined up retailers like Walmart and Amazon to make Tot Squad their provider of lactation, sleep, nutrition and car seat services and to pair them with related product sales. Walmart would pair Tot Squad’s services with breast pumps, car seats and formula. It doesn’t get any better than Walmart and Amazon wanting to provide your service… except if Target comes calling, too, which they did!

And then four days after the divestiture, everyone shut down their services businesses. Amazon’s sophisticated system of vetting providers and then paying them based on a location-tagged selfie taken at the customer’s location was null and void in a COVID lockdown environment. Walmart also shut down services due to COVID. Revenue went to zero. Tot Squad had furloughs. In some ways Jen was back to square one.

But, she wasn’t entirely starting from scratch. She had years of experience and network in the baby sector as a founder and CEO of a startup. She had an existing marketplace business - the car seat installation business that she kept. She had relationships with Amazon and Walmart for distribution. She had suppliers. And, she had a runway, so she went to work building the marketplace.

Now, she has major brands that want to include Tot Squad in their product offering. Kimberly-Clark called and wants to include Tot Squad’s sleep services as part of a major omni-channel activation for Huggies at Walmart. Abbott’s Similac has leaned on Tot Squad consultants for content related to their brand. 

This fall Jen plans to raise another $3-5M to upgrade the tech platform for scalability and recruit more suppliers as the market grows. Walmart has turned on their services business, and Amazon will follow suit, eventually. It’s still early in the maturation of the market for baby-related services, but Tot Squad has the right distribution partners and great founder-market fit.