Today we’d like to introduce you to Willow Li.
Willow, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
How I started was personal. As an immigrant living in the US raising two children, I was no stranger to cultural differences. I wanted my children to learn more about my culture and immerse them in Mandarin Chinese with the help of a caregiver. The process of finding the right caregiver proved difficult and extremely time consuming. Later on, when my dad was diagnosed with cancer, I wanted to prepare his arrival with a companion caregiver who could communicate about his needs in his home language. Again, this process was unnecessarily difficult.
First of all, I didn’t know where to start. Then when I reached out to friends and close circle, there weren’t many options because the network was limited. I also tried Care, but it was not tailored to the specific language group and again I received limited options. After close to a year of searching online and offline, I was able to find someone who fit our needs fortunately. However, the searching experience has led me to believe there has got to be a much more streamlined way in today’s day and age.
I knew many people around me had similar needs, but I didn’t know if they would pay for a service. I decided to test out the market by setting up a side hustle, to evaluate if anyone would be interested in becoming a customer. To my surprise, I was able to make $5k within a few months with minimal investment, which contributed to our initial pre-seed setup. Our customers were also very thankful to have found our service. At the same time, the experience allowed me to look into the non-medical caregiving communities and learn more about their desires to receive more job opportunities and contribute more of their services. On top of everything else, I also received requests for many different kinds of caregiving needs, including for other languages such as Spanish, French, Russian, Hindi/Urdu, Korean, Tagalog and Vietnamese. I knew I couldn’t personally support all these requests, so the idea of a platform with a service offering was born.
In November 2021, we officially launched the platform in English, Chinese, and Spanish. The platform bridges the gap by making search and communication easier, in the user’s preferred language. To date, we’ve made over 10k+ connections with a 4.7 TrustPilot rating.
We provide free trials and a membership model for our platform communities, and for those professionals who are very busy and don’t have the time to search for themselves, we offer our concierge service. After close to 20k members joining us, we believe our concept has been proven and are ready to grow through serving more languages and areas, including partnership.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way? Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
The road has not been smooth. Being a non-technical founder, building a technology platform was not easy. We first outsourced our platform to an agency and had our share of issues and bugs. It took longer than our original timeline, but we were able to power through all of these to get to MVP to prove out the concept.
Now we have transitioned into an in-house team, who are motivated and driven individuals. With an experienced tech leader, I believe we are positioned well for growth. Our goal is to continue to improve the user experience and make our tech as simple as possible for onboarding and connection.
Appreciate you sharing that. What should we know about AyiConnect?
AyiConnect is a multilingual care app to make it easy for multicultural families to find child and senior caregivers. Our goal is to make the searching and communication process as simple as possible and at an affordable price, so more families can get the care they need while more caregivers get additional job opportunities.
We truly care about our customers. We also understand transparency, options, quicker connection, and privacy are important for our users. That is why we spend a lot of time listening to and talking to users in order to make the connection experience better.
What sets us apart is not only that we put languages as a care front and center by making searching and communication easier through our app, but our concierge service also helps our customers make successful connections through our software. Because of our robust and quick customer support program, our users have enjoyed the experience with a 4.7 TrustPilot rating. To make it affordable and provide more users the ability to find care while maintaining our operations, we offer a membership pricing that is 1/3 of what other platforms charge, while our concierge pricing is about 20% of what a traditional agency charges.
Have you learned any interesting or important lessons due to the Covid-19 Crisis?
Covid-19 shed light on the important issues of keeping our community safe, not only from virus/immunization but also on how we needed to equip our community members with knowledge about physical safety, especially the minorities. Many of our caregivers decided to take a break due to the two reasons above.
Coming out of Covid, we are looking to roll out training courses to help them upskill themselves so they can get better opportunities to care for families with language needs at home.
Pricing:
- Free tier
- $39.99/3 months ($13.33/month) for subscription
- $109.99/12 months ($9/month) for subscription
- ~$599 for concierge
Contact Info:
- Website: www.ayiconnect.com
- Instagram: instagram.com/ayiconnect
- Facebook: facebook.com/ayiconnect
- Twitter: twitter.com/ayiconnect
- Other: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ayiconnect-family-helpers/id1259783974
