[DavidCode]

trcollinson, thanks for your thoughtful comments. A few points:

As far as training, I did my M.Div at Princeton & General Seminaries, with a chaplaincy in the pediatric ICU of a major hospital and hundreds of hours of pastoral counseling experience. But I don't have a psych degree. Perhaps that's what you meant.

Regarding my product, this is an MVP. I consider it "Draft 1" of a solution and I seek parents as beta-testers to help me come up with a better "Draft 2." I have been using Stanford's Design Thinking in my process, and the many parents I have interviewed, at length, don't seem as confident as you that their childcare problems can be solved with a Facebook page or the local community center.

Regarding danger, before Air BnB and Couchsurfing, people said, "Me? Sleep in a random stranger's home? Dangerous!" Before Uber and Lyft, people said, "Me? Ride in a random stranger's car? Dangerous!" Sharing communities are on the rise, and I believe they can speak to the problem of childcare--somehow. Not sure how yet, but we're experimenting.

I have tremendous faith in a parent's instinctive intuition to find other parents in her neighborhood, with whom she feels chemistry, over several face-to-face meetings, so that parents can cooperate to share the burden of childcare--just like our ancestors did in villages for millennia. If we are to find a solution to childcare, we cannot lead with fear, but rather with cooperation and goodwill.

Regarding the work of the Lord, ParentVillage strives to address the poor by giving them a co-op model where they can barter to solve their childcare needs, rather than the current cash model, which those I have interviewed find extremely prohibitive. The single mothers you listed are another demographic that I find particularly oppressed by the current cash model for childcare, and I hope that "Draft 4" (or perhaps 14) of ParentVillage can offer them some relief to an overwhelming aspect of single parenting.

Finally, neither my Bishop, nor the Episcopal Church, are paying me anything to work on this ministry. And I'm 50, with two kids close to college. I assure you that every mainline-denomination minister has a pension plan for which she has worked hard, and is grateful. To lose my pension and the accompanying insurance benefits is a serious blow to any minister's livelihood.

[trcollinson]

Fantastic! You should add all of this immediately. Suddenly you are a M.Div from Princeton with extensive experience in counseling and families. You have done extensive research. You have a process that beats what people are thinking about as the established processes. You still need to work on the product differentiator, but go for it and do it. The problem I am pointing out is that right at this moment your material doesn't show this at all. Fix it and you may get even more to sign up.

One other large issue you may run into is geography area issues. But if you get to that point then you will have solved other major areas of issue with your business plan and you can probably solve the geographic ones as well.

As for the benefits from the Episcopal Church, I assume that those cost money from the Church. I know you do not draw a salary from the Church, but pensions and health insurance still cost money. Many of us, myself included, have given up the safety and security of main stream jobs in order to handle start ups. You may have to do that yourself to make this work.