We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Jessica Etting a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Jessica, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.

My co-founder (and sister!) Amanda and I grew up back in analog times when our mom used to keep a huge multi-column day planner on the kitchen desk. If you wanted to know what plans you had that week, from soccer practice to dance rehearsal to sleepovers, you’d check the planner. Flyers from the school, birthday invitations and a grocery list hung from the bulletin board. It was the home base of everything we needed to know.

Flash forward to our own lives as parents and we found ourselves swimming in the chaos of modern family life that looked nothing like that – packed ever-changing schedules, a never-ending stream of school newsletters, texts, invites, What’sApp messages and a mile-long text thread with our partners to tag team what needs to get done all day, every day.

As working moms we were burning out and totally overwhelmed by the mental load of family life – everything that needed to get bought, ordered, thought of, planned and communicated – and we knew we weren’t alone. Every parent, particularly moms, seemed like they were in the same boat, too. In fact, we couldn’t figure out why no app or tool was out there already to help get families more organized.

So, we decided to build it ourselves.

Not only did we want to give all this information a place to live (besides our brain!) where everyone in the family could see it, we wanted to make it easier for everyone to see what needed to get done so they could chip in as well. Finally, we were determined to find ways to automate and streamline the most tedious parts of the mental load, like forwarding emails, photos and texts to Jam and getting everything auto-populated onto the right calendars and lists because who has time for that?

Our mission with Jam is to get families back on the same page, to reduce the mental load for parents and make family life more easy and equal

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

At Jam, we’re building technology designed specifically for families — shared calendars (where you can tag who is going, who is driving and what to bring), to-dos, chores, and lists that help automate some of the mental load that usually lives in parents’ heads. School emails, screenshots, schedules and reminders can now flow directly into Jam and get organized automatically through our AI assistant, Jaime.

What makes Jam different is that we’re building from lived experience. We deeply understand the stress, coordination and invisible labor that goes into running a household because we’re living it too. Our unique background is another differentiator. Amanda was a product director, specifically building project management software for businesses, while I have two decades of experience in the entertainment industry and marketing.

What I’m most proud of is hearing from users who tell us Jam has genuinely changed the dynamic in their household — helping partners communicate better, reducing stress and making the mental load feel more shared instead of carried by one person alone.

At the end of the day, our mission is simple: help families feel less overwhelmed and more connected.

We’d love to hear about how you met your business partner.

My co-founder is actually my sister, Amanda, so we technically met at birth! We have always had very complementary personalities and skill sets. Amanda is deeply product-focused and obsessive about user experience and systems, while I naturally gravitated more toward storytelling, strategy and big-picture vision.

I don’t think either of us would have predicted we’d someday be building a tech company side-by-side. But once we started talking seriously about the problem we were both experiencing as working moms, it became obvious we approached it with the same intensity and passion.

I think being sisters actually gave us a huge advantage early on because there’s an implicit level of trust and honesty that’s impossible to manufacture. We can move quickly, disagree directly, and still know at the end of the day we’re completely aligned on the mission.

Building a company with your sibling is definitely intense, but it’s also incredibly meaningful. There’s something really special about getting to create something together that we genuinely believe can improve people’s daily lives.

How do you keep in touch with clients and foster brand loyalty?

One thing that’s very important to us is staying incredibly close to our users. Even as Jam has grown, Amanda and I still personally answer customer emails ourselves every single day. We read the feedback, troubleshoot issues, celebrate wins with families and hear firsthand what’s frustrating people, what’s helping them and what they wish existed.

Honestly, a huge amount of our product roadmap has come directly from those conversations.

I think users can tell when a company is genuinely listening versus just broadcasting at them. Families send us screenshots of their schedules, tell us stories about stressful mornings, co-parenting challenges, ADHD struggles, forgotten school events — really personal parts of their lives. We don’t take that trust lightly.

We also try to build Jam very publicly and collaboratively with our community. We’re constantly asking for feedback, testing ideas, improving features based on real family behavior and creating resources that go beyond the app itself, whether that’s mental load conversations, seasonal planning guides or practical tools for parents.

At the end of the day, brand loyalty comes from making people feel understood. Families don’t just want software — they want to feel like someone finally “gets” how hard modern family life can be. That’s the relationship we try to build with our users every day.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.jamfamilycalendar.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jamfamilycalendar
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jamfamilycalendar
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessica-koosed-etting-01617810/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@JamFamilyCalendar

Image Credits

Brandon Andre