We recently connected with Amina Sako and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, Amina thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. How did you come up with the idea for your business?
As a nanny for the past 11 years, I have consistently relied on online platforms to find childcare jobs throughout my career. However, I have always been struck by the impersonal nature of the hiring process on these platforms. The relationship between a child caregiver and a family is inherently personal, yet the current hiring process fails to reflect this reality. Instead, it is presented as a transactional convenience, lacking the authenticity and personalization that is crucial for such an intimate arrangement.
For the past decade, this issue has been at the back of my head, and I always hoped that the current platforms would solve it, but they never did. With each new platform came a duplicate of the last, and I constantly wondered when this problem would be addressed. It wasn’t until I came out of a brutal relationship that I found a method that could work. As a 20-something getting back into the dating scene, I went straight to the dating apps. I was intrigued by how I was able to meet someone across the world and get to know them intimately through robust and clear profiles. I couldn’t help but get distracted by the thought of how this would be an amazing way to connect in a childcare app.
Immediately, my wheels started turning. I began to hypothesize how this approach could remove the current imbalance between families and caregivers and create a fair platform where transparency and fairness were at the forefront. I envisioned how this could streamline the sourcing process through algorithms and how including multimedia would make the process much more immersive, among other benefits. I was thrilled by the possibilities!
I thought back to my own experiences and how, when I was invited to the home of a prospective family, I would google them or skim through their Facebook to get a feel of who they were. This realization only fueled my excitement further.
Without hesitation, I began to get to work. I continued nannying during the day, but I dedicated my early mornings and nights to developing this platform. My passion for improving the childcare industry and my firsthand understanding of its challenges drove me to pour my energy into bringing this vision to life.
With an iPad and pencil in hand, I immediately started to wireframe. While I was building I began to speak to my community on the Upper East Side. This included nannies in my area, past families I’ve worked it and I ensure I wasn’t the only one dealing with this problem. When I began building I was building a platform with caregivers in mind. This was because current platforms were built around just the needs of the families it provide limited tools for caregivers to be able authentically showcase themselves. By doing so I realized, that building core features for caregivers in a way streamlined the process for families.
I knew that what I was building was worthwhile because I understood the frustrations on both ends. However, my hypothesis was later validated through conversations and the excitement I received from caregivers and families as I began to enter communities around NYC through Facebook groups for nannies, babysitters, and more. I saw the social aspect that we were building makeshift in these Facebook groups, such as multimedia, personalities being showcased, and so much more. That’s when I realized we were building the first childcare platform that connects families and caregivers based on compatibility.
We weren’t just another babysitting app or platform; we were the first immersive childcare platform that promoted human connection and true compatibility. Our approach is personal, fun, and most importantly, human. I speak a lot about the compatibility between a family and a caregiver, but this also translates to the longevity of the relationship between the caregiver and the child(ren) they are caring for.
Our goal is to reduce the churn of caregivers leaving families for the sake of the child. Caregivers and children have a special bond that goes beyond a job. We are their friends, protectors, teachers, therapists, and more. We wear so many hats, and the last thing we want at Karamacare is high churn, as it affects the children just as much as it affects the caregiver.
At Karamacare, we understand the importance of the caregiver-child relationship and the impact that frequent changes can have on a child’s well-being. By prioritizing compatibility and fostering long-lasting connections, we aim to create a stable and nurturing environment for children while also providing caregivers with fulfilling and rewarding positions.
We are excited to change the norm in the childcare hiring process and bring humanity back into the equation. Our mission is to empower caregivers by providing them with the tools they need to make informed decisions while also listening to the unique needs of each family. We believe that by doing so, we can disrupt the outdated methods that current platforms use and truly humanize and decentralize the hiring experience. This is what excites me the most about our platform. By incorporating transparency, authenticity, fairness, efficiency, and most importantly, personalization, we have created something important not just for this generation but for the next generation of families and caregivers as well. We understand that the relationship between a caregiver and a family is a deeply personal one, and we want to ensure that our platform reflects that. We understand that no family is alike, and the same goes for caregivers. With different family dynamics entering the equation, we incorporate inclusion and diversity, and the same applies to caregivers. There is a caregiver for every family and their unique needs, and a family is waiting to celebrate a caregiver for who they are.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
I was born in Accra, Ghana, but when I was just 6 months old, my father and siblings moved to New York City. Growing up, I split my time between Ghana and New York. My parents have been married for 50 years, but they spent most of their marriage living apart. My mother, an entrepreneur in Ghana, sold goods in Accra’s largest market, Makola market, while my father stayed in New York, working as a yellow cab driver. Despite the distance, they worked together to build the life we have now, and I’ve always aspired to have a partnership like theirs.
As the youngest of 6 siblings, with my older brother being 11 years my senior, I often felt like an only child due to the significant age gaps between us. However, when my siblings started having children of their own, I was at the perfect age for babysitting. I naturally fell into the role of the family’s designated unpaid babysitter, a responsibility I loved. Family has always been incredibly important to us, and this experience only strengthened our bonds.
My childcare experience began under tragic circumstances when my oldest sister lost her husband while she was 5 months pregnant after they had been trying to have a baby for 10 years. Tragically, when her son turned two, my sister also passed away due to cancer, which was devastating for our family.
Before her untimely passing, my sister Rakiya ran a charity in Ghana called Survival Of The Children. Her mission was to provide essential resources like food, shelter, and education to underprivileged kids. It was her passion. She was the oldest of the 6 siblings, but ironically, her nickname was Karama, which means “little one” in Hausa. As the youngest in the family, I always joked that I should’ve been the one with that nickname instead of her. It was a running gag between us. In honor of my sister’s memory and to carry on her legacy and love for helping children, I named our platform after her: Karamacare. This fitting tribute perfectly captures her spirit and dedication.
After my sister’s passing, our family and the Bronx community came together to help with childcare, and I took on the role of providing after-school care for my nephew. I found the experience of watching him reach developmental milestones and being a part of his growth incredibly fulfilling. It felt as though I had gained a younger brother, filling the void of growing up alone. As my family continued to grow, with the addition of six more nieces and nephews, my love for childcare deepened. This led me to start nannying professionally while in college. I discovered that childcare was not just a job for me; it was something I truly loved doing. It went beyond job responsibilities.
Over the decades, I worked with about 8 families. As I progressed through my career and experienced different families, it became more than just a job. I created deep bonds with the families and especially the children I worked for. There were jobs where I spent more time with the children than anyone in their family and positions where I ran entire households with multiple staff, but most importantly, I cherished the relationships I had with the children. It was the role of confidant, therapist, nurse, teacher, and the list goes on. My proudest moments are when I am transitioning from a job and feel like I have contributed immensely to a child’s life, knowing that I helped shape them into a good person. It’s like a Nanny McPhee or Mary Poppins moment when you feel like your work is done. However, it goes beyond that for me. I have families I have worked with who I’m still in contact with, whose children can call me and speak to me about issues, and I am able to help them.
How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?
Here’s the fixed version of your text:
When I first got the idea for Karamacare, I was one year into my nanny position. Once I was sure I wanted to build the platform, I began the search for a technical co-founder. Eventually, I found a guy in the UK through YC co-founder match who claimed he could build the platform. We spent 7 months in empty meetings, and not a single line of code was written. After 7 months, I decided to part ways with him. I was left with nothing but app designs that, looking back, provided a very bad user experience. I was hopeless and didn’t want to spend another 7 months starting from scratch. I was miserable because I had prematurely told people we would be launching, and I kept getting questions left, right, and center. I knew that this was a huge setback, and it made me feel awful.
After a week of wallowing in my misery, I decided there had to be a way. Even though I wasn’t technical, I was determined to find a way to build the platform. I even tried to use ChatGPT to code. I was determined to build even if it meant putting 99% of my weekly pay towards paying a dev team. So, even though the goal for me was to have a co-founder and to have a mobile app, it was clearly something that was not happening in that time. I decided to make do with what I had: my income, which would serve as capital to pay for a developer to build it, and the knowledge of what I wanted to build.
Later that week, I was on Reddit ranting and asking for advice, and that’s where I met my now lead developer, Mahfuz. We spent the next three months building the first version of Karamacare from the bottom up. It’s not a mobile app but a web platform, and I am now a single founder. So, though my plans didn’t go quite as I wanted them to, in the end, it worked out. It may not have happened for me now, but then again, we have a lot of work ahead of us.
How did you put together the initial capital you needed to start your business?
Funding Karamacare has been a completely bootstrapped endeavor. I had previously worked as a real estate agent and had managed to save about $30,000. In the first three months of building the initial version of our platform, which no longer exists, I used all of those funds. You could say a significant portion of the money was burned. The other half of my funds went towards branding, websites, and other essential aspects of setting up the business. When I decided to start again, I literally had nothing left. I had to save over 90% of my paycheck to afford building the platform that is now live. Initially, I was paying my lead developer out of my income every month, and things were going smoothly. UNTIL it was time to launch (a story for another day). I ran low on money and had to contact my family, mainly my dad, to loan me a few thousand dollars to pay the developers. Just days before launching our platform, we encountered a major issue that required about 9 developers to solve. It was a crazy time, and my family really helped me out with small loans to get through it.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.karamacare.com
- Instagram: @karamacare
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amina-sako-a12782141/