On the House
Your go-to source for no-nonsense marketing tips and startup insights, straight from the experts.
For decades, parents have been stuck cobbling together after-school care with spreadsheets, sticky notes, and late-night Google searches.
Sound familiar? Did you also feel that chill run up your spine.
Stop blowing through cash. Start making bank.
If your startup marketing strategy feels like throwing spaghetti at the wall, you're not alone.
You've tried the trending hashtags and the cold email blast your advisor swore by.
You've tried whatever your competitor did last quarter, minus the part where you actually understood why it worked for them.
None of it sticks the way you hoped, and your runway keeps getting shorter while it takes you longer to figure out what does.
This isn't a "spend more" problem. It's a "spend smarter" problem.
Self-criticism. Perfectionism. Burnout.
If you've spent any time around high-achieving women, you've watched this cycle play out — or lived it yourself. It's exactly why we keep coming back to founders like Dr. Ashley Solomon.
Dr. Ashley Solomon spent a decade seeing women get stuck in an endless cycle of self-criticism, perfectionism, and burnout across every level of care she worked in.
What she noticed wasn't a lack of willpower. It was a lack of the right support to break free.
So, she founded Galia Collaborative to help women do three things: heal, thrive and lead.
Most businesses make the same mistake. They try to speak to everyone and end up resonating with no one. Their website sounds like it was written for a committee. Their content is polished but vague. Their messaging is technically correct but emotionally flat.
And the frustrating part? It is not a strategy problem or a budget problem. It is a messaging problem.
We have worked alongside founders and growth-stage companies long enough to know the pattern. The product is great. The team is sharp. But the messaging is trying to do too much.
We were not immune to it either. Before we could ask our clients to do the hard work, we had to do it ourselves. So we went back to our own website, got specific about who we were talking to and started writing directly to them.
The results were impossible to ignore. In the first five months of 2025, we saw a 400% increase in qualified leads compared to all of 2024. Not more traffic for the sake of traffic. More of the right people finding us, staying on our site and reaching out ready to work.
For years, employer-sponsored healthcare has been one of the most confusing and frustrating parts of working life. Premiums rise, options feel limited, and employees are left navigating a system that rarely reflects how people actually live. For parents looking for the best healthcare option for their families, the options become bleaker and even more expensive year over year. In 2026 alone, the cost of healthcare rose 9%, driven by AI initiatives and costly GLP-1s. Across the board, healthcare costs have increased by 62% in the last ten years. Healthcare benefits are important (understatement!) But when the entire landscape is so obfuscated, there are missed appointments, unexpected bills, and the constant mental load of trying to make the "right" healthcare decisions for a family.Sound familiar?
Startups, Founders & Stuff We Love
When Abbey Donnell and Jules Lairson launched Work& in 2017, they weren’t just creating another workplace perk.
This wasn’t about having 12 different types of milk in the office kitchen, unlimited kombucha on tap, or other nice (but ultimately inconsequential) perks in the workplace.
If you’ve been around here long enough, you know that this is a hill we’ll die on: Workplaces were not built with working parents in mind, especially not working mothers.
For most parents, it comes as no surprise that caregiving is one of the biggest drivers of turnover, burnout, and underutilized benefits. So, why are leaders still ignoring the loud, persistent call for change?
In corporate America, leadership training often focuses on hard skills. Skills like strategic planning, financial acumen, or managing performance are in high demand.
During her years inside Fortune 500 and biotech organizations, Jess Ringgenberg started focusing on what was missing from all leadership training.
When two founders combine lived experience with technical expertise, the result is usually pretty impressive. This combination yields a product or service that feels both intuitive and indispensable.
When Carly Buxton and Michelle Cunningham launched Parentswarm, we wondered how we lived without it?
Let’s start off with a quick scenario.
Every parent has been there. The regular sitter canceled. The must-attend dinner that you swore was scheduled for Friday is actually….tonight.
Whether the reason, you need childcare — and you need it now. You text Lily, but she’s booked. So you text Kaylee, but she is busy until 8pm. She has a friend named Madison who babysat for you once. Then, you reach out to Rachel, but she doesn’t text back right away. Did you try Kaylee? What about Cindy? Who is Madison, anyway?
If you’ve ever been caught in a scheduling Maelstrom like this, we see you — and so do the two founders of Parentswarm.