It was August 2010 and Rochelle Nemrow had just finished filling out, once again, the same information (child’s name, family insurance information, emergency contact, etc.) for school. Then she turned her attention to the soccer signups, and the art school. All the same information. “There has to be an easier way.” And FamilyID, an online program registration and payment platform, was born.
“I was frustrated with the inconvenient, repetitive process of registering my children for activities,” said Nemrow. “School, sports, camp, and recreation … I was filling out the same information on the same registration forms again and again and again.”
She continued, “At the same time, it’s a time-consuming nightmare for program providers to collect all that information on participants. Sports programs in particular need a huge amount of information for every player – doctor permissions, emergency contacts, insurance information, and it needs to be kept simultaneously within reach and secure.”
FamilyID is dedicated to connecting families with programs and activities through a centralized online registration platform. Nemrow believes that finding, sharing and signing up for programs should be convenient, secure and easy for both program providers and their participants. “FamilyID was created with program providers in mind and families at heart,” Nemrow said.
FamilyID is Nemrow’s second stint as a founder. She was previously the cofounder and headed up marketing and product strategy for Press Access, one of the first online media database companies. She sold the company to LexisNexis in 2000 and worked within the company, heading up the PR Information Systems group, before leaving for the consulting world.
Parents looking to re-enter the workforce after raising kids have found great success re-launching their careers at FamilyID. “We hire a lot of former stay-at-home parents, particularly in sales and customer service. Parents understand intimately the problem we’re solving. If they have worked previously in sales, we find they can jump right back in.”
Today, with FamilyID customers across the country, the company is also distributed. “We have team members in the Midwest and West coast to best cover regions outside of New England where FamilyID has a strong presence. In today’s world, working remotely is easy. But there are distinct challenges in maintaining a unified culture with a distributed team. One of my goals as we scale is building a singular company culture where everyone feels aligned with the company mission. That’s one reason we applied for Constant Contact’s SMB Innoloft accelerator, to learn more about building a winning company.” (The Small Business Innovation Program, which was housed in Constant Contact’s Innoloft at the company’s Waltham headquarters, was hosted and run by Constant Contact, a leading Boston-area software company that offers a platform for email marketing.)
In addition to participating in an accelerator, Nemrow also made the decision to seek funding in order to quickly scale. “Our decision to raise capital allowed us to more quickly expand our team, our sales and marketing programs, and invest in product development. In addition to capital, the funding provides access to seasoned entrepreneurs with the specific experience and skills to help us accelerate the growth of our business.”
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