Kidslox
Children need boundaries. Traditionally these have been regulated by parents and educators. This is being undermined in the digital age by the growing adoption and dependence on mobile digital devices, which can open up access to both the positive and negative aspects of the world.
This is where Kidslox helps. We provide an App that allows parents to manage the time spent and content viewed on their child’s devices (our iOS and Android apps are both available to download), allowing them to explore only what their parent deems appropriate and to choose when they can do so.
Our vision is to allow children to explore the digital world as it will be essential to their future, but to learn to be responsible for their own choices. We aim to give parents peace of mind, as Kidslox empowers them to decide for themselves where these boundaries should be set.
The growing adoption of mobile devices, their extension into the lives of children through digital media, games and in education is of growing concern for Parents, Educators, Charities and Government. The implications on emotional and physical health are uncertain, and the social impact of engaging remotely whilst leaving a digital imprint is motivating these stakeholders to take action.
Kidslox addresses a significant need by providing a solution to the problem of what content is consumed, how much time is spent on digital devices and when, and finally, what imprint children are leaving on the web.
We are continuing to develop the product to enable children to participate in making responsible choices about how much time they spend and to provide parents with the tools to facilitate this.
There are approximately 100m children between the ages of 4 and 14 in the UK, EU, and USA. Of this, approximately 8m are in the UK. This is a massive market and area of need.
We believe that Kidslox is strongly positioned to fill the underdeveloped market addressing parents concerns about the growing access to and proliferation of these devices into the daily life of children. We have identified a number of channels that will help promote the product and get us visibility.
We regard the Parental Control market as still in its infancy, and whilst various attempts have been made at delivering a solution they have all faced a common set of problems. These include integrating the technology with the low level of technical expertise of many parents, providing a complete, reliable and easy to manage solution, and meeting expectations around price. The market is beginning to receive greater media coverage and is seeing increased investment. We want to make sure that we have the backing to execute our plan to leverage the strengths of our product offering.
Kidslox has already delivered proof of concept convincingly in our start-up phase and has focused on learning what the issues are for customers, delivering a product and customer service that outperforms our competition. We conducted quantitative and qualitative research and have built a great team to scale the business.
We have been awarded equity free grants of £172,453 by the UK’s innovation agency, InnovateUK, and €60,000 by the EU CHEST Fund for social innovation.
On the Apple App Store, Kidslox has received over 35,000 views in the last 5 months. We saw a 100% growth rate during the last month following our latest update. This is all prior to marketing the product, which we plan to do once the Android version has been successfully integrated.
We have customers in 60 countries already with 57% of the sales to date being made in the USA.
Having established a clear product market fit, during the final quarter of 2015 we plan to increase the visibility of the product through the execution of our sales and marketing strategy that would see Kidslox increase the profile of the brand on social media and in the press. We will also commence the second phase of development intended to open further competitive advantage including the development of a multi-lingual version of the App.
Our Roadmap will help us grow this advantage whilst working on developing collective engagement in supporting the solution as an essential and responsible part of parenting. We intend to do this through building content and engagement via our website and across the parenting debate.