PikMyKid Founder Speaks
Today, our founder, Pat Bhava, spoke at the St. Pete One Million Cups Forum; a forum of startup and small business owners collaborating to share ideas, tips, and to support each other through the company-building process.
The forum is held every week at the St. Pete Greenhouse, where two business CEO’s in various stages of starting or running their business present and then take a panel of questions and suggestions from the crowd. PikMykid is actually a veteran presenter, and has presented at this forum since the early days of the company. In fact, many faces in the crowd were familiar, and were amazed at how far our once tiny company has come!
Pat had a blast answering crowd questions, and the crowd certainly asked some good ones. One gentleman had a pressing question especially relevant to our product. He asked, “In today’s era, there are a lot of concerns relating to cyber security and losing private information. If a child loses their phone, how does PikMykid account for that?” Pat had an answer for him. “Absolutely, cyber security is a huge concern,” he said. “To mitigate that , we actually have zero dependency on any sort of tracking devices for each child – we don’t even use the term “tracking” – in our product. Instead, each teacher digitally checks that the student has gotten on a bus or to their designated pickup spot. The responsibility lies on the adults, not children. Parents are recognized via the app as soon as they step onto campus, to ensure the teacher gets the kid to the parent as soon as possible. But no, we don’t have any hardware that the child should be responsible for.”
Another woman asked about the hardware and people required for the implementation of the product in schools. “Well, actually we have almost no hardware”, said Pat. “All of our product is digital and can be set up at long distance. In fact, all we send to schools is a stop sign that reminds parents to announce via the app when they enter the carline. Since all of our data is on the cloud, we don’t have physical records, either.”
A gentleman also had another important question- what’s in it for the schools? Why do they want to pay 3,000 dollars for the product? “Actually this is an easy question,” said Pat, grinning. “Every day, schools pay teachers almost an hour of overtime, waste paper, and annoy parents with a time intensive, unnecessarily long process. In fact, the University of South Florida researched it, and they estimated that schools actually save over $45,000 with the PikMyKid app. For that, $3000 is a small price to pay.”
Pat also had some exciting news to share. “We are actually now officially collaborating with the Florida Department of Transportation! Since we help take cars off the road to decongest areas near schools, they are working with us to help us expand and improve our product even further to give schools the best possible experience.”
After a great presentation and panel, there was a meet-and-greet session with the crowd. Pat got the opportunity to help out many small business CEO’s and share tidbits of knowledge he picked up in the field. He even had the opportunity to have a cup of Kahwa coffee and a talk with fellow entrepreneurs in different fields.
