We’ve announced a lot of dramatic new things already this year. There’s the Chairman Mom app. (Still in beta, but coming to the App Store soon!) There’s our plan to buy 1,000 working women dinner this year, finding them their new best friend/business partner/confidant in the process. (Think of it like Tupperware parties, but the product is empowerment…)

Now there is something else exciting to tell you about, believe it or not. Since last August, our team has been working tremendously hard on an adjacent, but new, idea. 

TL;DR: It’s called NeedHop and it just went live on the App Store. You can check it out here.

The original idea came when we noticed a lot of you were using Chairman Mom threads to arrange 1:1 phone calls or meetings with other members to solve particularly difficult problems. We also saw these one-on-one conversations happening in real time at our meetups and events. 

At first, we started to work on a separate product under the Chairman Mom umbrella that could help people find that one person who has already struggled with whatever they are struggling with most. We have always disliked the whole “picking your brains over coffee” thing: It disproportionately devalues women’s experience, asking them to give away that hard earned knowledge for free, and then guilting them if they don’t. We wanted to make it normal to pay that person for their expertise, whether they chose to keep that money or give it to charity. 

Hard-earned knowledge is your most valuable asset. Way more than a car or a house you can share, or your brute force labor delivering things or driving people around. What excited me about this was unlocking that economic engine. I don’t know a woman who couldn’t use another $500 a month for “brain picking” she’s giving out for free anyway. 

We thought this was such a compelling idea, that we put a lot of Chairman Mom’s product roadmap on hold for the second half of the year building it out. But the farther we got, the more we realized this was not only a separate product, but a separate company. And so NeedHop was born. 

There’s a lot of overlap with the companies and not just on the mission. I am remaining (beyond!) full-time committed to Chairman Mom, which is poised to have a breakout year between our rapidly growing dinners and our 600-company strong pipeline of HR teams evaluating buying Chairman Mom for their employees and existing corporate customers surging in users. But I am also a co-founder in NeedHop, as are Shea and Monica, Chairman Mom’s phenomenal all-female developer team since its earliest days. Paul is NeedHop’s CEO. Paul and I have worked on four companies together; Shea and Monica have worked on three companies together, and the four of us have now worked on two companies together. I have never been part of a better founding team in terms of mix of skills, determination, hustle, problem solving, trust and EVERYTHING. 

You can download the MVP (minimum viable product) of NeedHop right now on the App Store. (Android coming very soon!) The payment part isn’t in there yet, but it’s coming soon as well. We’re already seeing a ton of problems being posted, and people seem to be stumbling across it, trying it and loving it. Give the Chairman Mom community inspired so much of NeedHop, we’d love it if you’d try it out and let us know what you think. Just glancing at the main feed right now, I know there are a ton of problems that CM members can help with one-on-one. 

And of course, please share it with anyone you think might love it too!

Today’s new questions on Chairman Mom:

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