Family Organization Simplified: Interview with BeFamily Founder Gavin Zuchlinski

After exiting his scheduling startup Acuity Scheduling for $50 million, serial entrepreneur Gavin Zuchlinski set his sights on a new challenge – helping families stay organized. His latest venture, BeFamily, is a smart assistant app designed to help families collaborate and share schedules, tasks, plans, and activities.

As a father and husband, Zuchlinski was inspired to create BeFamily after frustrations trying to coordinate family life during an early retirement. He saw an opportunity to fill a gap in the market, as most productivity apps focus solely on individual organization rather than true family collaboration.

With BeFamily, the goal is to reduce the mental load of running a household by removing gatekeeping issues and improving communication. The app allows families to share responsibilities more evenly, with everyone’s schedules, tasks, and plans visible by default.

Zuchlinski brings a wealth of experience to his latest startup, having bootstrapped and grown Acuity Scheduling from a solo project into a business worth tens of millions. We sat down with the serial entrepreneur to learn more about his vision for empowering families through technology with BeFamily.

Please provide a brief introduction of yourself and your professional background.

With a background in computational mathematics, I initially worked at federal agencies in the intelligence community where I had a side hustle developing my own company called Acuity Scheduling. Acuity was an online appointment scheduling platform that I initially built to help my mom, a massage therapist. The side hustle eventually became full-time and by 2019 Squarespace acquired my company for $50 million. It was Squarespace’s first acquisition, and it included an equity grant to have me join them to lead Acuity’s integration efforts.

Please tell us a bit more about your startup – what does it offer, what problem does it solve, and who is your target audience?

BeFamily was created to address the real problem families have when they are trying to organize their lives, beyond scheduling matters. Typically, family work is unevenly shared between partners, as one family member almost always handles more of the load than the others – and even then families operate archaically. BeFamily solves this by providing the tools through its smart assistant, tools that remove gatekeeping issues which improve communication and in turn allows families to share more of the work and reduce the mental load of running a family. Every member’s schedules/tasks/plans are shared by default on the app, which makes space for partners to see what each other are doing, possibly help out on more tasks, and collaborate.

BeFamily was developed with families in mind, but it can also be used by any group of people who want to share schedules, tasks, etc. Anything from a very tight knit group friends to couples on-the-go who need to communicate about what is happening in their lives.

What inspired you to start your own business? What was the “aha” moment?

After my time at Squarespace, a stroke of inspiration hit me during my newfound free time with my family during an early retirement. I found over time that I was becoming frustrated with the difficulties my family and I were having coordinating things, schedules, and tasks – all which lead to more work! I started developing a platform that would best help families spend more time collaborating and less time working to get things organized. This is when BeFamily was born.

What were some of the biggest initial challenges you faced in getting your business off the ground? How did you overcome them?

My last business, Acuity Scheduling, struggled with efficient bootstrapping, but BeFamily is very different. After exiting Acuity with millions in the bank, BeFamily is a project of passion and one looking to solve a very personal need. To be totally honest, the biggest challenge is convincing my immediate family that, after such great past success, there’s even a need to spend our resources and so much time building something new.

How did you identify a gap in the market or need that your business fulfills?

After researching the market, I found that most of the apps in the scheduling/planning space focus entirely on organizational needs for users, but not necessarily how they could help families communicate better. I felt that there was room in this corner of the App Store for something that can help families be more present – and no one scheduling app seemed to be a silver bullet for this need.

What has been your approach to funding your startup? Did you use your own savings, seek investors, crowdfund?

100% my own money. My last company was purely bootstrapped, I took absolutely no money at all and saw the creative freedom it gave me. I’m open to investors in the future, however, as the only major negative to bootstrapping is the lack of acceleration a founder may need for growth at inflection points. UntilI see BeFamily at an inflection point, it will remain 100% personally funded.

How did you go about building your team and attracting talent in the early days?

Over the years I’ve worked with many talented people, but when starting something new it’s wonderful to pick the absolute top few of the greatest people. By choosing people I’ve already worked with I don’t have to sweat the vetting process but more importantly our work is accelerated from day one because we skipped past the “team gelling phase” and onto more productive work.

What have been some of the toughest decisions you’ve had to make as a founder? Any stand out as pivotal?

When to grow/invest and when not to are challenging. At a later stage so many of the most important decisions are resource allocation, and at an earlier stage those are less obvious but no less important. When I first started BeFamily we saw such an incredible amount of excitement and positive feedback it would have been easy to try to grow quickly. But, I didn’t. That was hard.

To question #6 I might regret this, you don’t always see an inflection point until after it has passed. Right now though we’re holding back much of our resources to ensure that there are 3 main points all signaling success: (1) people love the product (2) people stay with it for the long term (3) it can grow on its own. We’ve nailed #1 and #2, but #3 is still to be seen and it’s not clear what the future will look like.

What have been your key strategies for growth and gaining traction/users?

B2C products like BeFamily cannot grow by paid marketing alone. Looking at the top B2C profitable apps in the app store, none rely on paid marketing.

However, we’ve seen great success initially with Google banner ads (something myself from 5 years ago would never have dreamed of saying) and newsletters for acquiring users. Prior to investing in acquisition we spent a significant effort working on retention, which primarily is around making a product that people enjoy using every day (and don’t forget about). Our two main tactics for this were filling gaps in features & push notifications to pull people back in.

Finally, the hope is to snowball off of this initial paid acquisition and into more product lead growth through features, like collaboration, that are more valuable when others you know are invited.

How do you stand out from the competition in your space? What sets your product/service apart?

What makes BeFamily different is that the app helps families share work, tasks, and plans by being a smart assistant to help them run a calmer, more collaborative family. The app provides the tools that remove gatekeeping issues, which improve communication and in turn allows families to share more of the work and reduce the mental load of running a family.

Organization is great, but it is a byproduct of using BeFamily, not the means to an end.

What have been some mistakes or failures you’ve made along the way as an entrepreneur? How did you recover and learn from them?

Firing.

Hiring is easy and it’s definitely harder to hire the exact right people, but personally I’ve struggled more with firing. I want to get to the best company as quickly as possible to create something great for customers. I’m going to make mistakes along the way and most are quickly reversible -except for hires. Fixing the hiring process only works for future people, but current employees can drag down morale, distract high performers, and worse.

I had been too generous to low performers and productivity vampires thinking that I can fix them or find a root cause of their issues. Sometimes you can, but that usually turned out to be incremental, so over time I found it was better to suck it up, risk the legal issues, and just terminate someone who is dragging down the company.

What do you know now that you wish you knew when you were first starting out?

Everything is growth.

In the early stages (and possibly even later ones) if you can’t draw a direct line to how what you’re working on connects to growth then it’s not worth doing. I feel much more focused now and I see more results knowing this. Before I mistook customer happiness as the main success, and that’s only one of many factors.

What are the most important skills someone needs to be a successful founder, in your opinion?

Creativity.

As the cost of creating things continues to decline, your own creativity is the differentiation that creates value. Personally, this is one of the main things I’m trying to cultivate in my own children since I think market dynamics are changing and will disproportionately reward creativity in the future.

What does a typical day or week look like for you? How do you manage work-life balance?

I’ve worked too much in the past, it hurts creativity and my family life.

Now I work roughly 6 hour days, exercising in the morning and spending time with family in the afternoons. I strictly limit meetings to give space to productive activities.

What do you find most rewarding and most challenging about being an entrepreneur?

Most rewarding– talking to a random person at a party and having them use what I’ve built. It’s really fulfilling, it’s like the product is a child that has grown up on its own and been successful.

Most challenging– staying focused for the long haul. Entrepreneurship is definitely a marathon.

What are some future goals or plans you have for your business in the next few years?

We’re just at the beginning of our journey to help families think less about managing their family, and more time on enjoying their lives. We’ve created some phenomenal tools to keep things organized, and the future will be in doing more of those tasks for you.

What advice would you give to aspiring entrepreneurs who want to start their own company?

Just do it already.

I meet too many aspiring entrepreneurs who overthink their ideas, or think they need more experience, more connections, or more of “something.” You’re probably wrong about almost everything, so it’s better to face it sooner than overthinking it and facing the same problems later.

After two successful tech startups under his belt, Gavin Zuchlinski shows no signs of slowing down. The BeFamily founder continues to refine his family organization app, with plans to further automate tasks and reduce the day-to-day management burden on users. For aspiring entrepreneurs, his advice is simple – stop overthinking and just get started.