Launch HN: Trustle (YC W20) – On-demand child development experts for parents
We’re Elizabeth, Tom and Catalin - the founders of Trustle (https://www.trustle.com). We give parents of young children access to a dedicated expert in child development. When your kid stops sleeping through the night, starts having meltdowns, or is struggling in preschool, instead of frantically Googling things, we give you personal access to someone with expertise, who you can know and trust.
As parents, we know how hard it can be. One of us, Elizabeth, has a 5-year-old and is pregnant while going through YC. (She's amazing! And at the same time it's a heavy load.) We know it can feel that work takes up so much energy that there’s none left over for your kids, and paradoxically at the same time it can feel that all your energy is taken up by your kids and there’s none left for work. We’re all trying to create the best environment for our child, but the day to day reality of that can feel really hard.
And our support systems have changed dramatically; we’ve often moved away from the close-knit communities and extended families that used to be the norm. And when we go online we see an overwhelming amount of advice that’s often contradictory and just doesn’t feel applicable to our specific situation.
As well as being parents, we have a background in child development. Elizabeth is a clinical child psychologist, Tom has worked extensively in EdTech, and Catalin has applied ML to child behavioral health out of Stanford. We came together because of a shared appreciation for how crucial the home environment is for a child’s development, and a shared confusion as to why support for parents is so impersonal. We can’t think of another field that is as complex as child development where outside support and access to expertise isn't the norm.
So we created Trustle! We want to bridge the gap between parents and expertise. Whether it’s to solve a specific problem like sleep or behavioral challenges, or it’s to proactively prepare the right environment, Trustle gives parents a dedicated coach.
When a parent signs up we ask a few questions and match them with a suitable expert who is then available through video chat, phone, and in-app messaging whenever the parent needs them. All our experts have a least a decade of experience working with families and young children, a minimum of a master’s in early childhood development, and go through a fairly rigorous selection process.
We deeply appreciate how personal the parenting journey is. Our role is not to push our own beliefs. Instead, our coaches get to know families, and then use this relationship, paired with knowledge about child development and learning, to come up with solutions that work for their children, their goals, and their beliefs.
On the experts’ side, we use technology to amplify their ability to work with parents. First, technology can make them more efficient. We can create an automated ‘assistant’ for the coach that can surface the right information at the right time, and support the coach by preparing repetitive and unambiguous tasks. Second, we'll keep them up to date on the latest in child development research, as well as using the power of the network by giving coaches access to each other's learning and experience.
There’s no one-sized fits all ‘solution’ in raising children, which is why there is so much impersonal, contradictory information online that leads to parents feeling confused. We want to help parents cut through that, and figure out what works for them.
We know there are many parents on HN, including those with young children right now - we’d love to hear about your experiences and needs around this. And of course feedback and ideas!
144 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 192 ms ] threadDefinitely that is a thing. My kid is 3 - this is something we've wrestled with ourselves. A niche business idea, but I think it has validity. Checking Trustle out!
I dig the elephant motif, I just like elephants, and it's cute.
Let's see. Working through signup flow.
Picking the Coach - I don't know these people. I'd suggest that the initial assignment be done on Trustle-side. It seems that the essential differentiator of the three options I am initially presented with are the times they are available. Which is _unfair_ to these highly educated professionals IMO. I would like to understand the key differences between one coach and another beyond the statements - despite reading a certain amount of child development works, I don't per se understand clearly the specialist jargon.
The other thing that gives me pause is the cost - I don't have a way to do an evaluation besides dropping $70. Which isn't that much in the grand scheme of things, but it's more than, e.g., a typical dinner for two. I can imagine that there are a wide variety of effective general philosophies and, like talk therapists, some therapists are more effective for some people than others. This feeds back to the prior paragraph - it's easier to be confident in payment if you understand the approach of the coach, that it will work for your family.
On the evaluation - we offer a 30-day no questions asked money-back guarantee. Do you think a 'free intro call' or similar would feel better?
So my perspective on that is "I'll forget", because the cancellation is something on my shoulders. I'd rather have a free intake/lightweight coach session, where we feel each other out, and move forward from there, where we get charged if we continue, or not charged if not. That's a model I've seen for talk counseling.
I don't know what's the best for you as a company, though. Pricing is ticklish for consumer services, and I'm sure its even worse for health oriented services.
EDIT - I first get a warning about site security given http vs https. I then get an internal work network warning about the site --> Site name: www.trustle.com/ Category: Spam URLs
Thanks for the info on the site - are you accessing it over https or http when you get the error message? Any chance you can send you a screenshot at elizabeth@trustle.com. (our web flow should default to https)
If you're willing, can you email tom@trustle.com with your browser, location and URL that you're going to?
BTW just booked a 45m call to see if an expert can help us get our 6 week old to sleep through the night!
It seems like you need to position this service very carefully, since there is likely not a bright line between some of the issues parents might come to you for, versus seeing a pediatrician, behavioral health provider, or other health care provider.
And indeed, traditionally that's where parents would go with some of these issues (sleep issues, tantrums, etc.).
But your FAQs emphasize that you're not a health care service -- yet I wouldn't be surprised if parents rely on you to at least bring up when a health care provider should be brought into the loop.
Just out of curiosity, what would you say this service is intended to replace? Are your prospective subscribers people who would otherwise be reading books, poring through Internet advice, consulting friends and pediatricians, etc., and this service just saves them time versus the DIY alternative? Or are you courting people who have no idea how to do that stuff and their alternative is just suffering through it as best they can?
I think the service replaces parents who turn to google searches, facebook groups, and blogs for advice. This advice isn't always evidence-based, and it can't be tailored to the family. Zero to three reported from their national survey that 84% turn to articles specifically aimed at helping parents, but only 49% find them helpful.Parents do want guidance from child development professionals. 54% of parents say they would like information from a “special web site or blog from child development experts.” Additionally, 63% of parents overall say “I am skeptical of people who give parenting advice and recommendations if they don’t know my child and my situation specifically.” And this instinct is right. Trustle aims to fill this need.
Also, as a child psychologist, I spent SO much time speaking to friends and family who wanted support (and to know which advice was evidence-based), but the challenge didn't call for a professional (potty training, typical tantrums, etc).
I would love to hear more about what you think!
This brings another aspect of the responsiblity of your experts for giving any corrective advice to the parent. What is the ethical balance between giving a wrong advice vs. right advice that didn't work?
On the first, we're very cautious; we do not do diagnosis. What we do do is support parents in seeking out a diagnosis if that was the appropriate path. Our experts have all either done diagnosis or facilitated them in the past so they're good and knowing when to suggest that. The balance is in making sure we don't give parents a false confidence, but we find that the pairing of an expert with the family is much more effective than a parent wondering on their own.
On the second point, let me know if I misunderstood, but our goal is to give the right advice. We know that it won't always work and often that will be due to the unique nature of the specific family. Sometimes we will just get it wrong; we have a very rigorous selection process for the coaches and strong QA and ongoing support so we hopefully don't get it wrong very often. But we know we won't be perfect.
> ...we have a very rigorous selection process for the coaches and strong QA...
What is your QA approach? How do you tell a right expert advice from an insufficiently right?
If a parent is a practitioner of "strong-hand" approach. Your experts would suggest which side of the hand to use or not on which child's body part?
It's absurd, of course, the experts do develop their values and indeed philosophy based on their experience. Even AI based advisor would be acting according to programmed balances and checks.
Thus the importance of how you tell a wrong advice from a right one.
As a different example, let's take sleep - lots of different philosophies, and the research isn't clear on impact on development regarding which sleep approach is used. So, our professionals can help parents develop a plan based on the science of sleep, and how children learn to support the parent in forming a plan based on their philosophy.
This isn't different than what any evidence-based behavioral professional or a psychologist that a parent would seek out would do. And, it's an iterative process. We work with families over time to track change, iterate on plans, discuss snags, etc.
The balance and check is that its' evidence-based advice, not opinion. Does this help?
Is there any particular body of research that supports your evidence-based advice? I assume this reasearch is public, as to be validated.
Have you ever read Emily Oster? She talks a lot about deciphering the data on pregnancy and caring for children (she wrote expecting better and crib sheet). It's messy science, but there is absolutely data. All the more reason a professional can support a parent to understand how (if) it applies to them and could inform decisions they make when working through a challenge.
Many parents might be crying out for this kind of service, but I certainly would not be one of them. Hope that helps.
Both of these ends are somewhat irrational, with no one right solution. Especially so when it's a health issue, or living environment problem. Health calls for pediatrician attention.
There're already well established meeting point web sites for parents, like whattoexpect.com and similar. Which pretty much sooth parent's worries and give a variety of community-advices. As often as "it's a stage to grow over". And, in personal experience, we parents grow over it together with the kids.
Personally, I see benefit in a variety of resources vs. one central, no matter how expert, point. But I could understand busy parents' desire to source this from a single "curated" and customized place.
n.b., these instincts are absent in humans in general. what you refer to as instincts are what you were inculcated with through your prior life. Not everything you were inculcated with is de facto healthy. Case in point: one elderly gentleman I spoke with said that his instinct for proper child training is to take a stick and hit a child when they disobey, until the child obeys. He regrets the current society disallowing it.
If you indeed have a way to give superior advice to parents and result in presumably superior outcomes for parents and their children compared to the default, which is a parent who uses their own resources wouldn't it be more profitable to just open up a daycare?
In any case, I wish the Trustle team good luck, but I'm very skeptical that this is superior to just talking to people who have kids already. Kids are unique, but what constitutes a good environment isn't as broad as the landing page and marketing make it sound. Furthermore, if one does believe kids are unique that is with odds with the technology aspect of this business. Either kids are so unique that technology can't really be used to make things more efficient, or kids can be roughly grouped into categories, in which case - surely said information about children is already out there?
Finally - if blogs and content out of the web cannot be trusted, why should your experts' advice be? There are very smart people out there who have written books and blog posts. What's the value add beyond that? Since you're only paired with a single person, what if there is contradictory advice between your experts? Would you not simply be back at square one then?
Take sleep for example (a really common challenge we support parents with) - a lot of people have STRONG philosophical beliefs about sleep. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that - but research doesn't support that ONE approach to sleep is better than another (for example, sleep training vs. co-sleeping). However, the science of sleep can inform supporting a parent to make a plan that aligns with their philosophy (rather than their friends) AND is informed by science. We can help parents understand sleep patterns, the importance of timing of sleep (night and naps), pros and cons or various sleep training, shaping, or supporting approaches (etc, etc), and how to do it safely.
I think this is the main difference.
We can support parents in thinking though challenges and decisions as a partner - they bring their experience and expertise on their family and child - we bring the expertise on child development to inform choices.
I appreciate you sharing your thoughts!
> if blogs and content out of the web cannot be trusted, why should your experts' advice be? There are very smart people out there who have written books and blog posts.
The problem is, there are orders of magnitude more articles written by content marketers - between papers, lifestyle magazines, presell pages, social media groups, infographics, YouTube videos, etc. there's tons of it, and it has much better SEO than legit sources. I've worked next to some content marketers and seen how this is created - mostly, by mindless copy-pasting from other content marketers, and occasionally rephrasing things to avoid accusations of plagiarism.
The hard part of finding sources on-line is filtering out low-quality sources and misinformation. If Trustle can help with that - if they can develop and maintain a trustworthy reputation, this will be a service worth paying for.
Second, even for the high-quality stuff (and there is some really great stuff out there), it isn't necessarily right for a specific family. There's no way for a blog to understand a families specific goals or philosophy, or to take into account the unique situation of the child or parents. Families are complex, and we hope our coaches can help a family sort through that complexity and get the info that's right for them.
My first reaction is that our goal is to support parents and we'd want to be very careful before doing anything with their data. BUT if we can support the field at the same time as being 100% transparent with our families it would be great (e.g. they'd have to explicitly opt-in.)
But again, a great problem for the future :)
I'm curious who you're targeting with this product. Wealthier families tend to have nannies, who will match expertise with implementation. Middle class send their kids to daycare or after-school programs, who also match expertise and implementation. Since this service is just expertise, who are the families that a) can afford this and b) have the time/energy/money to do the implementation?
We support a range of families on Trustle: While lots of parents feel incredibly supported by their wonderful nannies, not all do. And while nannies certainly have expertise in lots of areas, we find that they don't in all domains (this is why lots of people have nannies and talk to their child's teachers or another behavioral health provider). I have even done sessions with parents AND nannies together.
Several of our coaches are educators. And I can strongly say that they are some of the strongest advocates for Trustle and our service. Our educators tell us that in their experience, parents are constantly asking for support during drop-off or parent teacher conferences that relates to challenges at home (rather than school). While the teachers feel they can help somewhat, they don't feel that they have the time and space to fully give the parents the support they need (we hear often from teachers that parents want a 5-minute drop off consult for a challenge that really requires more time).
We are far more affordable than most behavioral health (we are $50 dollars a month for membership which includes call time and unlimited text) and our accessibility by phone and the ability to text your coach makes implementation possible. We support parents to give them back some energy by helping them with accessible and affordable advice to make some changes and tackles challenges.
One thing that has been really exciting is how happy our families are on the service.
I bet your company, if successful, would be well positioned to make that at some point in the future. There are some tricky questions there, both in terms of effectiveness and ethics, about using an AI-powered chatbot instead of an actual expert. The experts are still needed but whether we're close to approximating human expert delivery of this type of advice with technology is an interesting question! Again, best of luck and I'll check you guys out.
This is really interesting and honestly, rings a bit true to me given what I've observed from their interactions. Here are some anecdotes I've observed from parenting information asymmetry:
1. A lot of young parents (think: less than 20 years old) show up at the ER with healthy crying babies and little or no information. When I was pre-med track and shadowed my father in the ER, I would see 3 or 4 of these parents in a 12 hour shift. Watching my father "bootstrap" each of these parents into what normal clinical baby behavior is prior to any health diagnosis was interesting: It was essentially a 30 minute 101 session about babies that are super important but also non-obvious. It was also obvious that the lessons really sunk in when it came from a third party clinician. It also wasn't uncommon to see the baby parents and the parent's parents in the ER, all taking notes.
2. For my mother (the clinical psychologist), I've observed that even highly-educated, well-resourced parents still struggle with everything necessary to learn when having an autistic child. These sessions would often range from immediate clinical needs, to year-by-year details of specific education needs for the rest of childhood, to the region and state-specific financial resources and saving accounts available for lifetime planning. My mother works with schools and publishes papers on this stuff, but the parents always came back because ability to have a very direct Q-and-A session about specific issues was incredibly valuable.
Anyway, my father is retiring soon but I'll tell my mother about your service. She can't travel as much but if it works via video chat, she may be up for taking sessions on it.
Both your mom and dad come at this in different ways but point to what we're trying to do. Kids get a pediatrician to help with their child's health, but then not much for everything else and so they rely on the health system when it's not needed.
Of course we have to be very careful not to go the other way - we can't have a single parent use us when they should be going to the health system. We make sure all our experts are on top of that - in fact, we hope that having close contact with a child development professional will help early diagnosis.
I'm also not a clinician or a parent so I'm going to refrain from giving out specific advice, even if I witnessed it first hand. I'll ask him next time I see him and if he has something written I'll update this comment.
I highly recommend the book Happiest Baby on the Block, and even more so, the video (still sold as a DVD, but you can also stream online[1]). There are a lot of shorter videos of the author, Harvey Karp doing his thing if you want a taste[2]). The basic idea is that because humans have to be born early due to skull size, babies have a virtual 4th trimester. For the first 3-4 months of life the best way to help them is to simulate the womb environment using the 5 S's: swaddling, sucking reflex, swaying (really more like jiggling), shhing (white noise), side or stomach position (for calming, not for sleeping). The right combination of these will activate a "calming reflex".
Another good starter resource I recommend is the Wonder Weeks book and app. It marks out periods when your baby will be going through a "leap" in cognitive ability, which often are accompanied by fussy behaviour that seems to come out of nowhere. It's very reassuring to understand that your baby, who you think you had figured out, is currently a bit overwhelmed because they are all of a sudden seeing clearly beyond 8 inches or understanding that things are related to other things, and knowing that the fussing is a natural adjustment period to new skills and awareness makes their sudden shifts in behavior interesting rather than distressing.
There are also 3-4 pages of great advice in the book Bringing up Bebe on the French approach to "sleep teaching", which revolves around taking a few minutes to watch a baby who wakes up crying instead of just picking them up right away, thus giving them a chance to fall back asleep naturally, combined with the idea of establishing a window between midnight and 5am when you calm a crying baby down with any method other than feeding. This helps them to establish the idea of nighttime and hopefully means that the parents can get some sleep. 4 hours of uninterrupted sleep is a godsend, especially for a breastfeeding mom.
A couple of books that should appeal to a lot of the HN crowd are Emily Oster's Expecting More and Cribsheet which looks at various aspects of pregnancy and childcare from a research-focused perspective.
Sleep training is really tough, and there are a lot of books out there that repeat the same ideas. I found Sleep Sense to have a pretty clearly laid method for "camping out" or "graduated extinction" aka "Ferberizing", both of which are more gentle than Weissbulth's full cry it out approach. YMMV and there are a lot of strong opinions on this. I'm in the middle of this so I'm less confident to make recommendations.
Feel free to email me.
[1] https://www.justwatch.com/ca/movie/the-happiest-baby-on-the-... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6OtPSfyZXNw
We want to use technology to make this service accessible and affordable to as many people as possible - for example being able to video chat rather than go to a physical location. But that's as far as we want to go.
Healthgrades is for finding a clinical service; we are not a health service. We often use the term coach (which isn't a perfect term but the best we have right now.) We hope it is an ongoing relationship and not just used when somethings 'going wrong.' Another way we sometimes talk about it is that it's like a really good friend who happens to have an incredible background in child development. With that in mind, we don't fall under hippa as we don't discuss medical issues, although we aim to be at hippa level regardless.
Yup - Catalin has a background in ML. We're not working on any ML stuff right now - he's just an incredible technologist! The closest I can see right now is us being able to maintain a body of knowledge similar to how most doctors use Up To Date. We could then use ML to surface the information to the coach / expert so they always have the most up to date knowledge at their finger tips.
We want to be as efficient as possible so we can support as many parents as possible, and as effective as possible so we provide the best support. But we never want to replace the direct human connection, nor to use data in any way that parents wouldn't want - we know if we lose any trust we've got nothing!
First, there are so many incredible experts in early childhood right now that - IMO - are undervalued. We have so many that want to have a home to use their skills in support of parents alongside whatever they currently do.
Second, we're investing heavily in the selection and then ongoing support and / professional development of our coaches.
Over time we will need to increase the support and development even further but for the foreseeable future we're just happy how many incredible people are out there.
A bit off-topic, but would love pointers to your top books / content on how to keep them challenged, how to steer negative behavior into something more positive, etc.
It’s less of a book than maybe an introduction to a framework he uses with his coaching clients. It’s not Hemingway but the key insight he exposed for me was that entrepreneurial parents raise kids with higher rates of depression. I don’t think he did a study to arrive at this conclusion but it was more an observation of people he knew. So he created a way for parents to engage their children using a format called the family board meeting. It’s basically a four hour one on one session doing an activity of the kids choosing without a cell phone involved. Kind of obvious but very hard to commit to when your business needs constant attention.
And if you are looking for advice, context is really important.
To directly answer though - my favorite parenting book is The Gardner and The Carpenter by Alison Gopnik
I think part of the challenge we're trying to help with is that lots of places (blogs, websites) say 'this is good for children.' Which could be true (if backed by the research) but that takes an averages approach (I love the book End of Average by Todd Rose.) It sounds a little millenial, but there is no average child and so an approach the uses averages often doesn't work.
Our experts get to know the specific family, philosophies and kids, and then bring their expertise (which includes the population scale research) to support them in a way that makes sense for them.
It's a bit like where we do population-level research on health, but we don't then expect that everyone take the same approach based on a few inputs. We still get them to talk to a doctor.
I believe this limits your use case and the products viability.
- Also, this product would only be needed/used for a specific amount of time in a kids life ( think a 1 year term limit for actually getting paid from your customer during the terrible 2's)
As for how much better the advice is than what's on Google... getting specific advice on your specific child from someone who is professionally trained and with whom your have a relationship is obviously going to be infinitely better with Google. I can't even understand why that question would be asked.
Love the idea, and I think it's really valuable.
We have plans to offer different access mechanisms in future to make this accessible to more people.
Our hope (and belief) is that all types of parents will appreciate having access to someone with expertise - how they access them can differ.
(That felt like a very odd way of responding but I hope it makes sense!)
1) uBlock Origin blocked 30 things within a minute of loading your main page. I understand you're a startup and want to measure things, but given the extremely sensitive nature of your subject domain, this is not a reassuring welcome.
2) Privacy Policy - it looks like you've made some headway towards being compliant with EU regulations, but stopped halfway short. That's understandable (you want to focus on a smaller market first). However, there are some mentions about passing data to marketing[0], like:
"We may share the information we collect about you (...) With vendors, consultants, marketing partners, and other service providers who need access to such information to carry out work on our behalf;", or:
"To our third-party vendors and service providers so that they may provide support for our internal and business operations, including for the processing of payments, handling of data processing, data verification, data storage, surveys, research, internal marketing, delivery of promotional, marketing and transaction materials, and our Services maintenance and security. These companies are authorized to use Your Information only as necessary to provide these services to us and are contractually obligated to keep Your Information confidential;"
I hope that in the future you'll go into details about with whom exactly you share what information, and what for (as will be required if you'll ever want to do business with EU customers), and also on how exactly you anonymize and de-identify data. Again, you're dealing with pretty sensitive information here; as a parent, I need to feel confident that I won't be feeding my kid to the advertising machine.
On a positive note, I do like the idea of your service, and would happily use something like this, as long as I can feel safe about the information I disclose.
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[0] - Despite the summary saying, "We would only ever share it with a third part if it was clear that this was a part of the service you were signing up for." (also, there's a typo there).
This should not be controversial as this would be found on pretty much any website that runs advertising and does user analytics, it's not really something to get all worked up over.
Also, I would probably recommend that small startups not put much effort into complying with EU regulations because:
1. EU regulators have limited time and are very unlikely to go after small startups.
2. As a result, the benefits of (costly) compliance aren't worth the costs.
The fact that this is found on so many websites is a controversial thing already.
FWIW, all I'm doing here is providing a (however small) market signal. They're free to ignore it; no hard feelings. I am in the target market - a parent of a small child, interested in using the service and with enough spare income to afford it. But I don't like the aspects I mentioned.
It's controversial to you, it's not controversial to the vast majority of people. Given that, the downsides of e.g. not being able to retarget advertising, not being able to understand effectively how users are using the website (with minimal effort), etc aren't worth the costs.
Say they were to just have those trackers pre-login and post-login there is nothing, they probably lose more business trying to emphasize this arcane fact that only extreme privacy-nerds care about on their homepage versus simply just ignoring them.
Downsides to the company. All upsides to me (you can understand effectively how users are using the website without doing extensive telemetry; in fact, this reduces your chances of A/B-testing yourself into full-blown user-hostility, as is common these days; see also: overfitting, Goodhart's law).
Not to mention: if you need detailed analytics, there are couple of self-hosted solutions available. Not at all that more complex to use, and at least they don't leak visitors' data to various shady third parties. Note that this particular product targets parents of small children and is bordering on "medical information" territory, so an analytics script from some random third party[0] which can track what FAQ options piqued your interests is especially worrisome in this context.
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[0] - I noticed from your profile that you have experience in the marketing industry, and you seem to not recognize Smartlook.
One would have to be extremely paranoid to think that most mainstream third-party data analytics providers are "shady", most of these providers (Segment, Amplitude, etc) all have clauses in the contracts that specify the end-user (the company in this case) as the owner of the data, and limit their usage of data to providing the services (meaning they're contractually obligated to NOT sell or do anything with the data).
In any case, it's a meaningless distinction, as the company could easily record all this data with native, first-party JS and proxy it to anyone they want on the backend and you would have no idea and no control over such a thing. This is already starting to happen, making all of the fuss about third-party metrics effectively just "privacy theater".
At the end of the day your behavioral data is going to the party whose software you're using, and if you don't trust them there is nothing that is going to stop them from doing whatever they want with that information.
This is tricky, as handling a person asking for a medical advice is a rather special thing, compared to a person asking to buy a vacuum cleaner.
The thing is, all of your medical info will go to all of the above trackers, and surely they will sell it to whoever wants to pay for that. Insurance companies included.
To clarify, none of the communication with your coach happens via the Trustle website.
The part that is full of the standard instrumentation and analytics, as you point out, is our onboarding flow. The info you enter here is - who you are, - when you can talk, - and what parenting challenges you face at the broadest level.
Those are the questions required to match you with your coach. The data in those initial three questions flows into Segment and from there into our analytics tools (Amplitude, Google Analytics, conversion tracking for ads, etc.). And while it's all encrypted, etc., you're right to say that it goes to a lot of places internally. We will not ever sell that info, but analyzing it using modern tools internally helps us understand what our users want and how we can do better.
What comes afterwards is end-to-end encrypted conversation with your coach.
Oh, and Trustle is not a health service provider. However, we strive to treat your data with the same level of rigor that a medical service provider would apply; as opposed to the person selling you a vacuum...
> The data in those initial three questions flows into Segment and from there into our analytics tools
This is the worrying part. The fact that you're a parent and the particular broad challenges you face are already somewhat sensitive and useful for advertisers. It's fine if this info stays with you internally. It's not fine if your service providers start using it for their own cross-site marketing purposes.
Between individuals, trust works transitively - you trust them, I trust you, therefore I somewhat trust them too, within the scope of our relationship. Between individuals and companies, in the realities of Internet and modern advertising, it unfortunately does not work that way.
(I don't really expect you do anything about third-party analytics on the frongpage; I just want to voice the concerns.)
> we strive to treat your data with the same level of rigor that a medical service provider would apply
Aim higher. I have a doctor in my family, and you wouldn't believe some of the privacy horror stories I hear happen in hospitals.
Maybe you should just not use the service if you're so against them marketing and tracking user behavior in an extremely standard way. Maybe you should not, in an extremely self-important and arrogant manner, expect everyone else to conform to your view of how the world should be and tell them to "aim higher" if they don't please your every need.
I realize this doesn't change your first impression, but the website is our 'business frontpage.' None of the service (which does definitely include sensitive information) takes place through the site.
Our PP is a bit boiler plate and I think the main thing is to make it clearer about the things you've mentioned and separate the service from use of the website. So for example we do track who clicks on what on the website using things like Segment, but we don't do that in the tech product you use to communicate with the expert.
I'd love to chat more about learning if it's in the communication or if it's what we're doing? If you're willing, could you email tom@trustle.com? (And of course no expectation to do so! You've been so helpful with what you've shared so far.)
I'm sure I'm not the only one thinking this way, so perhaps consider describing the privacy aspects of the service itself somewhere on the front page.
EDIT:
I had a productive e-mail conversation with 'tomsayer which alleviated my concerns about the data processing surrounding the service itself. I look forward to the improvements on the site!
My wife is a special education teacher, and she is like an Autism whisperer. She is amazing. It's incredible to see her understand and communicate with nonverbal children. What often appears to be a temper tantrum to most, can actually be a communication effort.
It is a lot of fun to watch her work her magic.
We support all families! If there is an additional factor (such as autism) we take care to make sure parents see us as a support for them, and not a replacement for whatever supports they have in place for their child. But lots of parents appreciate having a partner in their support system. Lots of our coaches have extensive experience with specific diagnoses.
Would love for you to try us! We offer a full 30-day money back guarantee as we know this is something parents want to be confident in.
The ongoing disintegration of the normative human society, loss of extended family structures, and escalating segmentation of what used to be a community to different age and class groups well separated in spacetime is a world-wide disaster with far-reaching ripples.
One of the obvious consequences is for-profit organizations entering the vacuum left by communities. Of course Elizabeth et. al. are not to blame, they cannot fix reality and nor can I.
And yet... this is just depressing.
While one of the changes we think about is that, the more positive one is that we now know SO much about how the young brain develops. We want parents to have access to that in a meaningful way. I often use the healthcare analogy; when someone wants support with their health (whether proactive wellness or reactive treatment) they'll often go to a doctor which is great (and why it's so bad when people don't have healthcare). Raising a child is of course different in many ways, but the internet is awash with generic, impersonal advice whereas we hope to bring back the human connection. We're excited to be able to bring this growing field of expertize to parents in a way that is deeply human at it's heart.
But yes... changes in communities are still depressing.
btw, normative countries provide plenty of help and support, for free, to young first-time parents. This is probably the best investment a society could do, even in terms of purely financial ROI!
And agree! The organization Zero to Three does a great job advocating for this in the US but we're still way behind.
It's not very long term, but kraamverzorgsters in the Netherlands are a great example!
My theory is that this is the true price of obtaining financial freedom, and hence actual freedom. Community requires compromise (sometimes unfairly more from some than others). But once the glue of economic dependence on one another is removed, what is the force that would make people compromise? Everyone can do their own thing, which is nice, but seems to have some pretty big unforeseen large scale downsides that are slowly revealing themselves.
As a father of 2 I know, it's very frustrating to trust any books, coaches in child development and especially content online.
We are in the Jewish community, most of the friends had many kids, and we could turn for advice. If I didn't have this, I don't know what I would do.
The hardest thing for me would be to trust you to connect me with an expert.
Good luck. It's a hard problem and if it works, you will save a lot of lives and parent's health :)
Trust takes time to build definitely - and honestly, we don't do it - we wish we could! The trust-building really starts to happen in the first call when each side gets to know each other (and beyond just the expert's credentials and bio.)
As a suggestion, I’d rather buy a 5 or 10 pack rather than a monthly subscription. We don’t need this every month but expect to use it more than once
Child development industry fads come and go, sometimes drifting away from sanity and reality.
I should also say that we have parents on our service who have 5 children, and tell us each is different, and they still appreciate the support and wisdom.
If you can find a way out of that, for example by avoiding knowledge of identity, the service could be safe to use. Maybe you could take payment in a privacy-protecting cryptocurrency (not Bitcoin) and have the users connect with a tor browser.
Even if there is a problem, how is it not better to address that? If the parents don't feel safe, they will avoid all those service providers. The kids don't get help if using the service providers is too risky for the parents.
In any case, there will be no talking if the parent would need to trust you but doesn't. That doesn't help kids.
You can't change the law, but you can avoid having identity information to report. Parts of the solution probably involve non-attributable cryptocurrency and tor browsers.
I will say lots of our parents are self-aware. They might be frustrated or mystified by their child's behavior (and that's completely fair!), but the fact that they are willing to talk with us means they are open to the idea that they as the parent can change things environmentally and behaviorally to help the child. I think the parents on our service are pretty amazing.
Please feel free to link up on LinkedIn. linkedin.com/in/ladorabl
I'm based in the San Francisco Bay Area, if you are free to chat over coffee or have a phone/skype conversation.
I've also worked with a couple of friends to help design an ML platform to accelerate learning in the emergent literacy years; starting with Cardinality (learning how to count).