Startup Idea: Speakeasy: A Mobile App for Kids with Speech Delay

Startup idea to develop a mobile app that will be a communication aid for kids with speech delay. This app allows parents to upload pictures of various objects, categorized accordingly, and record their voice saying the object's name. The kid can then select a thumbnail of the object and the app would play the recorded word. Apart from aiding communication, it can serve as a learning tool for new words. There's a potential market among parents and speech therapists, with revenue from app purchase and possibly a scaled SaaS model.

This is a personal submission by Justin.

My kid has a speech delay. I had an idea for an app that would be really helpful for any parent in my situation and all parents with a pre-speech kid.

I notice that my kid is perfectly able to point to thumbnails on Netflix to tell us what show he want's to watch.

So, I imagine a mobile app where parents could take pictures of things like:

• Milk
• Cereal
• The Park
• The Beach
• Etc

And then record themselves saying the word like "milk", and then storing those pictures by category like "Food", or "Places".

Then, the kid could use the app to communicate with the parents about what they want.

This is a huge frustration for parents with speech delay kids and could save many tantrums.

It would work by the kid scrolling through thumbnails and clicking on the thing they want.

So if a kid want's milk, they click the milk thumbnail and the app would say "Milk" in momy's voice..

This would also double up as a great way for the kid to learn words because it would be their parent speaking the word when they clicked it.

My wife likes the name "Speakeasy" for the app. But, of course, that's just a suggestion.

Regarding revenue.

On a very basic level I'm pretty sure that parents would pay $4.99 for the app and that you could sell it to 2000 parents. I guess that because I was able to sell 2000 copies of a much less useful board game app with those numbers ;)

That said, if executed really well with good ux it is the kind of thing that could get picked up by many new parents. I know when we were new parents we were looking a everything that could help our kid.

In which case it could be monetized by releasing a free version that allowed the parent to store, say, 10 pics in one category, and then in app purchase to a $1.99 version (going for scale here).

This would also be a pretty amazing tool for speech therapists so there may be a SaaS play where these therapists could give away free copies of this app to all their parents.

Regarding tech. This would be quite easy to make in Titanium or Xamarin or native. I would not recommend web view as I've tried to do thumbnail based app in Cordova and it just doesn't have the performance to do that well beyond 20 or so thumbnails.

Regarding marketing. There are soooo many app review sites for moms and new parents. So, that could be a great way to start marketing efforts.

As always I do not recommend you build this without talking to potential customers or at least starting to build an audience.

Of course, "I" would buy this from you right now, that said, I have very high expectations and it would suck if it was not a really fluid native style app ;)