EPISODE Highlights:
This week we’re chatting with Michael Perry, founder of the Maple app, designed to help make managing your home easier by expanding the ownership of responsibilities to more than just moms and creating a “back office” for your home.
Dr. Whitney: This week we’re chatting with Michael Perry, founder of the
Maple app, designed to help make managing your home easier by expanding the ownership of responsibilities to more than just moms and creating a “back office” for your home.
Women are afraid of asking for help because they don’t want to appear as nagging. Maple really serves as that middle man and kind of does the nagging for you, right?
Michael: There’s been the same examples for us of motherhood and fatherhood for millions of years and we easily slip into those patterns when it comes to household responsibilities, even if it doesn’t make sense for our families anymore. There’s twice as many families with two working parents than there were in 1940, so things are different. But most people just avoid those conversations to ask for help and suffer in silence while most men honestly don’t realize the poor division of labor. So Maple can really be a lightbulb moment for many to realize exactly how much each partner is doing. We owe it to ourselves and our families to step up in these seasons.
Dr. Whitney: Can you walk us through how the app works? I know it’s a division of labor, but how does it work?
Michael: The goal is to have a more shared responsibility in your home, so when you sign up, it immediately allows you to add a life partner or nanny (whomever you want to share responsibility with) to the app. Then it asks you the one thing you want to get started working on, whether that’s grocery shopping, bills and finances, household chores, birthday parties, or planning summer camps. Anyone you invite has access to those topics. Within each of those, there are four tools: calendaring, to dos, a shared notes area, and a messaging area. Everyone sees everything that’s put in so the entire home can get a real clear idea of what needs to be done and who is assigned to what tasks. This allows you to run your home as efficiently as you would a business, and, like any business, everyone is expected to participate.
Dr. Whitney: When you treat your home like a business, it elevates the work from being just seen as “housewife work” to being seen as work that has value. And if it doesn’t have value, we shouldn’t be doing it.
Michael: Exactly and at the end of the day, our children are our life's work. That’s what we will care most about at the end of our lives. We take the tooling we built for homes very seriously because our promise to our users is that with our app, they’re going to do their best work in terms of caring and raising our families.
Dr. Whitney: I think that’s where the “lean in” movement gets it wrong. I’m all for women rising up and working hard and getting c-suites, but it can’t be at the expense of having great relationships with our families and kids.
Michael: I can’t name the most influential person in 1900 or the best selling book of 1920 or even 2020. But I can tell you that I miss my grandfather who recently died. And I will miss him for the rest of my life. But it wasn’t how much money he made or what he accomplished that I will miss. It was the time he spent with us. The world won’t miss me. The world won’t miss Maple. But my children will miss me the same way I miss my grandfather. We don’t really matter that much to the world, but we matter a lot to certain people, most often our children. And we wanted to be able to create that for more families.
Dr. Whitney: Where can people find you and the app so people can take the contention out of these conversations and really get centered on what matters most in their lives?
Over on
instagram and
Twitter for my personal stuff as well as
instagram for the app. You can also find us at our website at
growmaple.com.
