Aviva Founder Amy Briggs on AI, Parenting, and Solving the Mental Load

Speaker 1: Welcome to She Built It. I'm your host, Melanie Bar. The mental load of parenting is real, and it's largely invisible. It lives in the school emails that no one reads until it's too late. The theme days remembered at 7:00 a.m., the camp deadlines buried in an inbox, and the group texts that spiral into chaos. Most founders look at that problem and see a content opportunity. Today, Amy Briggs joins us. Amy is the founder of Aviva, a scheduling assistant app built specifically for parents that saves users an average of 4 hours per week. Aviva automatically finds family plans across emails, school communications, and work calendars, adds them, detects conflicts, and sends reminders, so parents are not the system. Amy came into tech from speech therapy, which means she built this from a deep understanding of what parents actually need. Thank you for joining us, Amy. Aviva saves parents an average of 4 hours a week. Most productivity tools promise that and fail. What did you figure out that everyone else missed? We

Speaker 2: built this tool from the inside out as a team of people who deeply understood the problem, experienced it ourselves as parents, and really understood all of the nitty-gritty detail that goes into doing the job of calendaring everything for ourselves and our families successfully. So that differentiated us right out of the gate. We weren't trying to build a cool tech tool. I never thought I would be in tech in the first place. I came to this as a solution vehicle out of necessity. I'm a twin mom and so many products are built, like you said, out of necessity and out of a sincere need. I go through the weekends of my husband saying, "What field are we supposed to be on? Where are we supposed to go?" So, I'm on all the apps connected to Google calendar, but sometimes I even type it all out because I think I need to understand what's coming up this weekend and last weekend we had eight games. We had two tournaments and then two additional games and I thought this is not normal. But it is it is you know like so many parents are in your same boat and especially if you have multiple kids and that overlap even more intense. I've got kids who are one grade apart, so not quite twins, but very, very close, where the events are happening often at the same time or overlapping and often at two different places, and we can't split ourselves into two different places. So, the logistics become truly a nightmare if you don't have help.

Speaker 1: So, true. You say that you are an unlikely tech founder. What did your background give you that a more traditional path into tech couldn't? I

Speaker 2: started out my career as a pediatric speech and language pathologist. I've always loved children. I knew I wanted to support families and have always found that work deeply rewarding, very meaningful. And I went into private practice just as COVID was winding down. I had been in public schools prior to that. I entered private practice. I saw a look behind the curtain on what modern parenthood was like for other moms

Speaker 1: outside of my own experience as a working mom trying to balance things for my own family. And I saw how incredibly unsustainable the bar was for what good parenting was supposed to look like, which had actually now very little to do with how we were attending to our children and so much to do with all of the choices around them. what snacks we were providing, were we rotating toys appropriately, did we read the current parenting book, are we gentle enough, are we having enough boundaries, the list goes on and on and on. And what I saw clinically was these incredible parents who I regarded with such high esteem as a clinician who were constantly telling me they knew they were failing. And I thought, wait a minute, these are not failures. These are shining examples of parents. They have gone to great lengths to get support for their kids. I'm here in the first place. I don't really care if the house is a mess. I don't really care that much if your child is having a snack when I arrive. And I understand as a mom myself when other moms would tell me, "Oh no, we're not home. We forgot you're coming." Cuz I've missed appointments. I remember taking my older daughter to a birthday party and we tend to run late for birthday parties and it's like a fire duel to get out of the house. So we're like, "Let's go, let's go, let's go." We have to get in the car, get the gift. And we were going to be a little bit late. And when we got there, my first sign that I missed something was that the parking lot at this very busy children's place was empty. I was the only car there. So I was like, something is a miss. And it turned out we were an hour early. So we were there before the birthday child. I tried to find something for us to do. There was nothing for us to do there. I saw something I thought was a pet store. It turned out to be a hot dog shop. I have been there myself. And that's a conversation that I just found myself having over and over and over again with all of the parents I was serving. and in my own life with all of my friends. And I became obsessed with the idea that there had to be some way to unpack and dismantle some component of this huge invisible mental load that disproportionately moms are carrying. It's extremely burdensome for working moms who are already strapped then for time and capacity. There has to be something we could do. Surely this doesn't have to come down to a conversation. Every single year when the McKenzie data comes out and we see what women are disproportionately holding, there has to be another tool in our toolbox. I had a hypothesis that technology could be this tool. I had never built any technology myself other than communication devices for children. It's not something I ever envisioned myself doing. But as I was ideiating on this, AI tools became publicly available and I thought to myself, this is maybe a real opportunity for technology to take a meaningful workload that parents don't want to do that's actually not tied up in being a good parent that's not giving anyone any esteem completely off of people's plates. And I chose one vertical in that mental load, which was scheduling and managing all of the things in the family schedule because I had the hypothesis that technology and AI could take this job on and do the whole thing tiptotail. Not just make it look better or color code it or make it more organized or position it differently, but actually take meaningful work off of people's plates. So that's really what led me into technology. And I joined a tech incubator and I said to my husband, I think I'm going to try this and I'll carve out some time and we'll see how it goes. And are you okay doing bedtime once a week while I start this? And it just grew from there. Every step I took, the signal was stronger. This is so aligned. This is what I want to be building. So smart. I learned early on

Speaker 2: that when I'm organized, I'm a better parent. So, I see how your tech platform can make moms feel organized and when we're more relaxed, we can give more time to our kids.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Because it's really hard to completely unplug and give our kids our full and undivided attention. It's harder for our generation of parents than it's ever been before because the onslaught of information coming at us and that we are expected to juggle is often times happening on a screen. And in order to give our kids our full attention, we need to be able not only to put the phone down, but not to be having the thought process of what am I missing? What's coming in while I'm watching you play your game or while I'm listening to your story? Your mind is always in multiple places. And it's a constant hum of fear and anxiety. For every parent who I interviewed as I was building this product, so hundreds of parents, every single person told me, "I feel worried about what I'm going to miss. I know I'm going to miss something. It's just a matter of when and what it is and what the cost of that thing is. And even the parents I talked to who had grown children, so they were pretty far outside of the experience you and I may still be living dayto-day, still cited really specific examples about times they missed something and what that felt like to them. They were still holding that so closely. And that was a big part of my mission is not just giving people their time back is great, but if you're going to have time to use for something else, the mental deck needs to be cleared as well. So that was a big part of my mission, too. How can I take away some chunk of this worry and anxiety and stress and noise so that parents have the opportunity in these small moments of the day to actually unplug and be present, especially for the things that we're spending so much time setting up, we should be able to enjoy those, too.

Speaker 2: Yeah. And it's so tiring to check all the apps multiple times. And as my kids get older, they want to know the schedule, too. My daughter tends to go with the flow. My son wants to know what's coming up. For him to be able to see, okay, these are the games I have this weekend. This is how I can plan my time around it. I'm sure is also helpful for kids. Absolutely. In my family, I was the holder of that information before I created Aviva and before we started triing prototypes of it as a family, before we shared it with other people. It was the first time in our lives that my husband knew what we were doing on the weekend and didn't have to ask me. And sometimes I would joke with him, I feel like I'm in a spelling bee I didn't sign up for. What time is the birthday party? Where is it located? Is the gift a group gift or did we purchase something? And that's also not the kind of exchange that I want to have with my spouse who I love. I would much rather be talking about other things. That's not fun. No one wants that job. Without a tool like Aviva, without real support, there's not another way to get things done in a satisfactory manner. Aviva

Speaker 1: asked parents to hand over their inboxes and calendars. How did you build something that people trusted?

Speaker 2: This is really important to me. I think about this in probably a unique way because again I'm coming at this as someone under the umbrella of healthcare. So Aviva is not a healthcare tool. We're not bound by HIPPA. I built everything with that same mindset. I'm a mom myself. I've served so many other parents in my career. And first and foremost, it was very important to me that the only handling of data we did was you by your own choice and completely contained within your device. So we don't at this point store any data. We will never sell data. It's just something I am completely disinterested in doing. That's not why I went into business. That was part of it. Um certainly from the beginning having that background and that mindset and really having a positioning about technology that is deeply rooted in the idea that technology should be working in service of people. People should not be working in service of their technology. I'm not out to steal your time and attention. I'm out to give it back to you. So it's sort of flipping the idea of consumer tech on its head. Most apps are monetizing by buying your time and attention and or selling your data, especially if they're free. and it's not a part of what we do at all. So before we ever launched went through the level of data scrutiny and practice scrutiny from tools associated with Google where everything that we did was checked with a fine tooth comb both by Google and by a third party so that we had the highest security clearance to even be able to go into people's inboxes and find things. And then from there individual users can set their own preference. So if there are things that you don't want looked at, it's very easy to set a filter so that those emails are never viewed. And if there are things you know you want that are important to you, it's easy to set those too. You also don't have to do that part because we intuit it a lot. And there are a lot of things that across the board we will exclude for you

Speaker 1: that have nothing to do with building your schedule, your financial data, your social security number, those kinds of things. But in terms of building out your actual calendar, we will find if there's an event for you that we think is important for your family, we will find it and we will schedule it even if you never see the email.

Speaker 2: Is there a way to specifically say what to look for?

Speaker 1: Great question.

Speaker 2: And what to schedule?

Speaker 1: So there is our first version we did ask people to tell us what are you looking for and then we thought actually we don't have to do that. We have a better way where we can intuit it from a retroactive look at your email what you need and we can schedule those things for you so that your onboarding is extremely fast because parents have no time to waste and that would give another step if you're having to it gives another step and then if there's anything that you need to fine-tune you can go in and do that but there are kind of systemwide processes that we built in so that the tool is already thinking like I would think as a parent managing a calendar who's done this for thousands of hours over my lifetime doing this job.

Speaker 2: The family app space is crowded. How did you build something that spread by word of mouth and actually sticks?

Speaker 1: I was lucky that I chose a topic that people were already talking about. So, I didn't have the issue of trying to get people to consider this problem. Anytime you're at school pickup, on the soccer field, at the dance recital, the topic of dates, what's coming up, how other people are managing it, who's managing it in a household, and who's maybe just riding on the coattails of that person is a frequent topic of conversation. And the need and the pain of it is so visceral and so strong, and it happens so frequently for people. it's a regular occurrence that they're needing to think about this. That top of mind nature of scheduling really helped us so that if someone was trying Aviva and it helped them and it was successful, they were very likely to bring it up and that conversation was going to come up anyway because someone was going to be at pickup. I've already gotten probably eight text messages today from various group chats. When is the concert for third grade? When will we be having the class picnic? Is it at 12 or 12:15? And then there's some triage back and forth, but I can actually send everyone the event now who doesn't have a Viva and everyone who has a Viva has it automatically. I don't have to think about it. I don't have to memorize it. I don't have to wonder when it is. I don't know of any parents that would say, "No, that's not something I need." You hear about all the different scheduling tools. Someone recently told me about a calendar that sits somewhere and we're too on the move to try to deal with something like that. But I don't know any parents that would say, "No, I don't need more assistance in scheduling our lives." The big difference for us is there are other tools that do some scheduling and a variety of other tasks who are trying to solve some of the same problem of the invisible mental load of modern parenthood, which is great. My issue with those tools is they all revolve around one parent, which is again usually defaulting to moms, manually inputting information, still uploading information, color coding it, keeping it updated so it keeps working, especially the things that are displayed on a wall. There's a real cost if you don't keep that updated and your kids are checking it and your spouse is checking it and that's the hub that everyone's getting their information from. And I just don't think there's any reason anymore that that should be sitting on any parent's shoulders. That's not a job that anyone needs to be doing. There's no trophy for doing it well. There's such a cost for getting it wrong. It takes so much time and energy and that time and energy could be much better spent on a million other things. And again, the mental load is everything. It doesn't take away from the mental load. It just adds more right on top. Right.

Speaker 2: Walk us through your business model and the early decisions that you made about how to build and fund Aviva

Speaker 1: business model as a starting point. It's a business to consumer. So, Aviva to the user app and we're sold in the App Store and the Google Play Store, so for iOS and Android. And we also have a funnel that we maintain ourselves through the web. We made the decision to be business to consumer first because the consumer is really who we're trying to solve the problem we're solving for. And it made the most sense to me to really be disciplined and deeply understand what do parents need and want and is the solution we're creating solving that problem and to get that right and to meet parents exactly where they needed to be met before going after other businesses, other partners and things like that. So we really started with a grassroots effort with parents and I had the philosophy from the beginning again because this is a topic that people are already talking about that this would be best benefited from a viral growth engine. So a word of mouth one parent uses it shares it with friends they start using it share it with friends and before you know it you've got this little organic spreading effect. So that's really how we've started and what we've seen play out which has been really exciting and cool. And now as we're approaching our one-year mark in September since our launch and we've had some of that now I'm turning my attention and it sort of feels like learning a new element of business as someone who's never done this before to other strategic partners, other businesses who could benefit from either having Aviva be part of their offering to benefit their own business like doctor's offices that can't have their patients miss an appointment or park districts and sports organizations who are constantly sending out information that parents are usually missing because there's just in of information so going after those strategic partners as a businessto business play is our next step of growth but that's our model and how we've seen things as far as funding I chose from the beginning to bootstrap the company and I did this for a few reasons first and foremost I firmly believe and I'm passionate about the product that I'm putting out what I'm building the mission behind behind it and I'm willing to put my own money behind it to get started. So that's how I started it. And I also thought that the discipline and constraints of being really lean from the beginning would stop me from going after vanity metrics or extraneous things and really stay focused on what's the strongest, smallest, first iteration of this that I can put out. Who are the best possible people to build it with me? And it's also helped me probably attract mentors and adviserss and employees who are very aligned with what we're doing. They're not here because they're getting a huge paycheck at this point. They're here because they deeply want to solve this problem. They really understand and they really want to solve it. That's helped us stay lean and move faster and learn quickly and again just be scrappy and disciplined.

Speaker 2: So smart. I love how intentionally you're building the business in all the areas. And going back to the doctor's appointment, I recently missed a doctor's appointment and my twins have been with their pediatrician from birth and I just recently two times missed an appointment and said in all their lives, they're 13. I don't think I've missed an appointment, but I just did because of the schedule load. So, it's really smart to think about growing in that way.

Speaker 1: Absolutely. I always tell people this. It's so easy to miss things. It's amazing that we don't miss more than we do cuz if you think about how many emails and reminders and information you have coming in in a day as a parent, one school email alone is usually 35 to 40 dates in most districts. It's a huge number of events that you're needing to migrate to your calendar. It's too easy to miss something. Speaking of growth,

Speaker 2: AI is moving fast and every productivity tool is racing to embed it. How are you thinking about where AI takes Aviva

Speaker 1: next? We are really lucky that we are an AI native company. So we started with AI underpinning what we did and were very intentional about which AI tools we used and how we would build around the AI so that we could iterate with it and grow with it over time. And so even in the short time from when I started building even to launch the structure of AI and the way we were able to leverage it changed significantly and every month when I'm doing road mapping with my developer there's something new that we're adding because there's a new opportunity with AI that wasn't there before. So that part of things as um a founder and a builder is really exciting and really dynamic. And it's probably

Speaker 2: easier if you weren't a company that was already established and already had all your components in place and now you're trying to adopt AI and swap things out and rearchitect it. We architected it this way from the beginning with wrappers around everything so that we could play and experiment and fine-tune.

Speaker 1: And it's amazing. I love that you say it's exciting because I think it is too. You can either run from it or towards it. And you're right, things are changing every month. And it is exciting and fun.

Speaker 2: And listen, there are scary components of AI too. As a consumer, as a parent, as a person living in the world, there are bad actors. And this is a technology that has the power to do amazing things and really benefit humanity. And it also has the power to do really nefarious things that are a threat and a risk. it's real and on people's minds that this is coming after their jobs and their livelihoods and what does this look like for children in the future. It's so important to underscore that it's here. It's already permeated. This is a part of our society now and there's never been a more important time for people who deeply understand problems and are passionate about solving them to use this technology for that. Let's get ahead of what we want AI to be used for. so that we're not just the victims of what we fear, but the architects of what we would hope for.

Speaker 1: Aviva gives parents more time for presence and joy. How are you making sure to find and live your joy every

Speaker 2: day? I love this. I'm probably busier than I've ever been. My life got very, very chaotic as I moved into fully becoming a tech founder and launching this business. And I from the beginning set really intentional boundaries and I had a lot of conversations with my husband who's an incredible partner and said, "You know how important it is to me to be a present mom. You know how important it is to me to be a good friend and a good daughter and a wonderful wife and I don't want to miss those things. I'm very excited about what I'm building. Truthfully, I'm thinking about it all the time. I'm never not thinking about it." And so I want you to double check. If you start seeing things slipping or you feel like when I'm with the family, I'm not as present as I could be, I want you to tell me. So I've always had really good practices because I care a lot about boundaries around things like technology and my family and my household with keeping my phone parked in a charger, not checking emails when I'm with my kids. I do carve out work time after they go to sleep at night because I have to get things done. But I do make a concerted effort not to have distractions around me if I can avoid it. And so sometimes that looks like doing things outside of the house where I'm less likely to be distracted getting outside. I love having people over. I love hosting. I love community. And there are a few things that I did before Aviva and then after I started that are just regular recurring events that one

Speaker 1: of them I host and some of them I go to that really fill my cup and hold me accountable to doing things to be a person, not to be a mom, not to be a founder, not to be any of these other roles. So I run a cookbook club with two friends. It's so much fun. Yep. And we've grown to almost 200 people on our list. So people really love it. That's really fun. Every month I see some of my really good friends. I always meet new friends. We have a great meal. No one has to cook the whole thing. No one has to clean it all up. It's great. I just recently started playing ma jang. So when my now that my kids are a little bit older, similar to you, I feel like I have time for some fun hobbies now. It's so much fun to just get together with girlfriends and have a fun time and laugh and learn something new. And then getting into hobbies with my family. So my husband and I, as our kids have gotten older, really tried to share the things that we love and make us feel good with them. So we both love to bike and we love now that they can do more substantial biking. We can all take a bike trip together. We do vacations where we do it. Hiking, the same thing. He just taught my daughters how to skateboard, which was his number one thing as a kid, which gives me heart palpitations because I think they're going to harm themselves. But he loves it and they love it so much that I hopefully it's worth it. Ask me after we've been to the doctor about.

Speaker 2: Yeah, it will be. My kids skateboard, too.

Speaker 1: Okay. Okay, great. I try to be intentional and hold that time. That's what I'm here to do. I want parents to have time to be whole people because I know from all of the research that I've been a part of conducting as a clinician, read, happier parents have happier kids. And it sounds so simple, but it's really hard to do. And it's great that you have the thought partner in your husband and in your life and you've built the tool that allows you to have more joy in a busy and chaotic work life. Yeah, I'm a big proponent whether you're using Aviva or you have another system in place, making sure that everything is scheduled because it's very easy. The first things that parents will let go are the things that are for themselves if they're not represented on the calendar. And it's very easy for all of the steps that lead up to doing something not to be represented anywhere. So you have a birthday party, but you still have to buy a gift. You still have to plan a carpool. You still have to drive to and from. If that's not all on your calendar and you think you're doing something for yourself during that time, you're not. That's a piece of it, too. Really getting everything there so there's real visibility and then it's very easy to see when you do have free time and choose things that you enjoy doing.

Speaker 2: Thank you for building a tech platform that helps parents live easier and better lives. Please share with us how and where we can find you and Aviva. If

Speaker 1: anyone wants to connect who's building something or just has questions, people have been so generous to me as a founder. Please feel free to find me on LinkedIn. I'm happy to chat. Aviva is in the App Store and Play Store. It's Aviva Smart Family Scheduling. It starts with a two-eek free trial and we'd love to have anyone listening give it a try or you can visit our website at withavviva.com to learn more.