Homeroom — go-to-market plan

Status: hypothesis document. All numbers are targets to validate, not claims; pricing is a proposal, not a promise.

1. Positioning

For the parent who is the family's default logistics person, Homeroom is the school-notice assistant that turns every school email, flyer and screenshot into a short approved list of what to bring, pay, sign and attend — and hands it off to whoever's on pickup.

Unlike school comms apps (which add another inbox to check) or family organizers (which make you re-type everything), Homeroom reads the notice for you and stays out of the way.

Tone rules for all creative: respect parents' competence. The enemy is the filing system, not the parent. No "finally get organized" shaming copy — the audience already has it handled most days; we catch the days they don't.

2. First launch segment

Elementary-school (K–5) parents with 2+ kids and at least one non-parent caregiver in the weekly routine — grandparents, sitters, a second household. The multi-input problem is sharpest here: multiple teachers, multiple channels, multiple hands.

Pilot geography: one metro, 2–3 elementary schools, recruited through parents — not the school administration (staying opt-in keeps the pilot light and honest).

3. Channel experiments (in priority order)

Room parents & PTA-adjacent parents. The people who already forward the reminder are the highest-affinity users and the distribution channel — every caregiver brief they send is a product demo. Outreach: direct DM/email to room parents at pilot schools; offer a "class set" pilot, never a sales pitch to the PTA board.
Caregiver-handoff referrals. The brief is the viral loop: it arrives by text, reads as genuinely useful, ends with a one-line "made with Homeroom." Track brief → signup rate.
Local parent communities. School Facebook groups, neighborhood chats, parenting Discords — participate as a member with a useful artifact (the demo), not an ad. Opt-in replies only.
Owned short-form content. "Notice in, list out" screen recordings — real (anonymized) notices parsed in seconds. TikTok/Reels/Shorts. Low production cost, demonstrates the whole product in 15 seconds.
(Later) school-seasonal moments. Back-to-school August, conference week, field-trip season, picture day — times notices spike.

Deliberately excluded: paid search/social at pilot scale (unmeasurable at n<500), app-store featuring pitches (premature), broad influencer seeding.

4. Example creative

A: split-screen screen recording — left: a real-format field-trip email; right: four cards appear (SIGN · PAY $12 · BRING · ATTEND). Caption: "Friday's email, handled by Friday."
B: text-thread mockup — the caregiver brief arriving to "Grandpa" with a thumbs-up reply. Caption: "The brief, not the thread."
C: static image of a fridge covered in notices → arrow → one tidy list. Caption: "The filing system we all ended up with."

5. First-100-users plan

0–25: concierge pilot. Personal onboarding calls; I (the founder) help each family set up forwarding and add caregivers. White-glove is the point — it surfaces extraction failures no metrics dashboard will.
25–60: room-parent cohorts. 2–3 class sets; weekly office hours in a shared chat. Instrument everything, fix extraction misses same-week.
60–100: referral-driven. Caregiver-brief recipients converting to parents, plus community posts. Open the waitlist only after ≥60 to keep cohort quality.

Kill criteria for the wedge: if pilot families forward <2 notices/week after week 3, the value isn't real — pivot to whatever they do use (watch for caregiver-brief-only usage, which would still be a business).

6. Pricing hypothesis

Pilot: free through the school year, grandfathered launch pricing.
Post-pilot: ~$5/month or $39/year per family (all children, all caregivers). Hypothesis anchors: below a coffee, framed per-family not per-seat; test willingness-to-pay explicitly in concierge interviews before building billing.
Cost driver to watch: hosted extraction (~$0.005–0.02/notice at v1 volumes — immaterial until scale; revisit if a heavier model is needed).

7. Metrics & validation gates

Metric	Target (hypothesis)	Gate meaning
Activation: notices → approved list in week 1	≥60% of pilot families complete golden path	Onboarding + extraction accuracy sufficient
Extraction precision (per field)	≥90% fields correct-or-flagged; near-zero confident-wrong	Model is trustworthy enough to approve
Completed-action rate	≥70% of approved items marked done	The list is used, not browsed
Weekly return use (W4)	≥40% of families add ≥1 notice/week	Habit exists
Brief → signup	≥15% of brief recipients open the link; ≥5% sign up	Handoff loop works
WTP signal	≥30% of concierge interviewees accept $5/mo unprompted-adjacent	Pricing isn't fantasy

Gates are evaluated at pilot midpoint and end; numbers are targets to falsify, not forecasts.