Launch HN: Trustle (YC W20) – On-demand child development experts for parents

We support a range of families on Trustle: While lots of parents feel incredibly supported by their wonderful nannies, not all do. And while nannies certainly have expertise in lots of areas, we find that they don't in all domains (this is why lots of people have nannies and talk to their child's teachers or another behavioral health provider). I have even done sessions with parents AND nannies together.

Several of our coaches are educators. And I can strongly say that they are some of the strongest advocates for Trustle and our service. Our educators tell us that in their experience, parents are constantly asking for support during drop-off or parent teacher conferences that relates to challenges at home (rather than school). While the teachers feel they can help somewhat, they don't feel that they have the time and space to fully give the parents the support they need (we hear often from teachers that parents want a 5-minute drop off consult for a challenge that really requires more time).

We are far more affordable than most behavioral health (we are $50 dollars a month for membership which includes call time and unlimited text) and our accessibility by phone and the ability to text your coach makes implementation possible. We support parents to give them back some energy by helping them with accessible and affordable advice to make some changes and tackles challenges.

One thing that has been really exciting is how happy our families are on the service.

This is really interesting and honestly, rings a bit true to me given what I've observed from their interactions. Here are some anecdotes I've observed from parenting information asymmetry:

1. A lot of young parents (think: less than 20 years old) show up at the ER with healthy crying babies and little or no information. When I was pre-med track and shadowed my father in the ER, I would see 3 or 4 of these parents in a 12 hour shift. Watching my father "bootstrap" each of these parents into what normal clinical baby behavior is prior to any health diagnosis was interesting: It was essentially a 30 minute 101 session about babies that are super important but also non-obvious. It was also obvious that the lessons really sunk in when it came from a third party clinician. It also wasn't uncommon to see the baby parents and the parent's parents in the ER, all taking notes.

2. For my mother (the clinical psychologist), I've observed that even highly-educated, well-resourced parents still struggle with everything necessary to learn when having an autistic child. These sessions would often range from immediate clinical needs, to year-by-year details of specific education needs for the rest of childhood, to the region and state-specific financial resources and saving accounts available for lifetime planning. My mother works with schools and publishes papers on this stuff, but the parents always came back because ability to have a very direct Q-and-A session about specific issues was incredibly valuable.

Anyway, my father is retiring soon but I'll tell my mother about your service. She can't travel as much but if it works via video chat, she may be up for taking sessions on it.

> if blogs and content out of the web cannot be trusted, why should your experts' advice be? There are very smart people out there who have written books and blog posts.

The problem is, there are orders of magnitude more articles written by content marketers - between papers, lifestyle magazines, presell pages, social media groups, infographics, YouTube videos, etc. there's tons of it, and it has much better SEO than legit sources. I've worked next to some content marketers and seen how this is created - mostly, by mindless copy-pasting from other content marketers, and occasionally rephrasing things to avoid accusations of plagiarism.

The hard part of finding sources on-line is filtering out low-quality sources and misinformation. If Trustle can help with that - if they can develop and maintain a trustworthy reputation, this will be a service worth paying for.

We want to use technology to make this service accessible and affordable to as many people as possible - for example being able to video chat rather than go to a physical location. But that's as far as we want to go.

Second, even for the high-quality stuff (and there is some really great stuff out there), it isn't necessarily right for a specific family. There's no way for a blog to understand a families specific goals or philosophy, or to take into account the unique situation of the child or parents. Families are complex, and we hope our coaches can help a family sort through that complexity and get the info that's right for them.