Job Well Done: Making child’s play of household chores

Nobody likes doing household chores, especially kids. But a team from this year's Startup Weekend Dunedin has figured out a way to make the allocation and completion of chores fun and rewarding for both kids and their parents, while at the same time bringing families together.

The game is played with physical cards, and works like this: at the beginning of each week, a family holds a game of Job Well Done. There are thee packs of cards: Tasks, Actions, and Rewards. The Tasks pack is pre-loaded with all of the chores that need to be done around the house – vacuuming, sweeping the decks, cleaning the kitchen, etc. Parents have to play too. At the end of the game, each family member has their list of chores that need to be done by the end of the week. Action cards let you do things like swap a task with another family member or receive a reward for a completed task. There's one Butler Card in the pack which lets the player assign one of their tasks to another player, and they have to do it.

There are two types of rewards – family rewards ("go to the movies together"), and individual rewards ("have an ice cream"). But some of the rewards are actually booby prizes, such as "eat a new kind of vegetable that you've never had before".

In their testing during the weekend, kids loved the game and got the idea immediately, and kids were even able to explain it to other adults.

As in other Startup Weekends, the team formed organically from three people who were all attracted by the idea of a game to motivate kids. It started out as a game to determine pocket money, but after the team got out of the building early on Saturday morning to validate the original idea, they quickly learned that a much bigger pain point for parents was getting kids to do household chores. They also learned from their interviews that any such game should meet these success criteria: consistency, clear expectations, small but meaningful rewards chosen by the child, and that the child should be able to wield some negotiating power. And so the game was born.

There's a big potential market for this game – in their interviews of 85 parents, 68% of them said they had problems getting their kids to do chores. With 1.1m families in NZ, if the interviewees are a representative sample, that means there are over 750k families in NZ who might be attracted to buy this game. And with 52m families in the English-speaking world, the potential market size is over NZD 1.3b at a unit price of $25. The hard part, of course, is reaching them.

CEO Hannah Sinclair is an occupational therapist by trade, with an interest in motivation and behavioural change. She's joined on the team by CMO Anna Schmid and Head of Game Design Ivan Mason.

Ivan has a blended family, and says that when faced with conflict over household chores, it can be easier to just disengage and do the chore yourself rather than being the bad guy and coercing kids to do their fair share. The trick, he says, is to have the game impose the rules, which puts everyone on the same footing. Hannah adds that while she doesn't have any kids herself, she's looking forward to using the game with her flatmates.

During the weekend, the team designed the game play, outsourced design of the game material to a UK-based designer who produced the goods overnight, printed the game materials for a few prototypes, and put together a Facebook page, a PledgeMe campaign, and a Shopify online store. The PledgeMe campaign has attracted more than $400 in less than 12 hours.

The next step is to get enough games out in the wild to test it properly and improve the game design. They'll then know whether they are really onto something or not. They're considering expansion packs, building in virality by adding trading card features, and partnering with organisations like supermarkets for distribution. They could seek investment, but this is a business that could bootstrap.

As for now, they're immediately looking forward to getting some sleep after "running, running, running" non-stop over the weekend.

"Startup Weekend has restored my faith in humanity," says Hannah, "I've never heard so many people in one place saying 'I'm here to help'".

There are lots of Startup Weekends coming up this year around the country.  Check out the Startup Weekend NZ web site for details if you're interested in having a go yourself.

If you have kids and want to improve their participation in household work, do support the team and buy a the Job Well Done game on their PledgeMe page.