If you want to become an app entrepreneur, a good place to start is by identifying a problem you are personally dealing with and finding a way to use tech to solve it.
For Zoe Desmond, her app, Frolo, came from her experience as a single parent and the loneliness that came along with that. Desmond and her partner separated two years ago, not long after their son Billy had turned one, and she says she found it very isolating.
“I didn’t know any other single parents in my life – none of my friends and family. I began to dread the weekends, I would start to panic about how to get by and fill the days. Then there was the guilt of not being able to be my best self for my son, not wanting to impose on friends and family on their family time,” she tells the Standard.
What she really wanted was to find a community of people who were in a similar situation and would understand. The other platforms and apps out there didn’t offer the right space: the Facebook forums were full of too much negativity and mum apps like Peanut and Mush didn’t have the right search system to find other single parents.
But it was after bumping into an acquaintance who lived close by in May last year and discovering she was bringing up her child alone too, that Desmond decided she needed to be the one to launch the platform.
“That was the lightbulb moment, thinking we are everywhere” she says. “That’s when I went for it gung ho.”
The newly-released app is made up of four parts: Discovery, which suggests parents based on shared interests, kids’ age, and location; Private messaging, to speak to other parents; Community Newsfeed; and Frolo Meetups, which can be used to create weekends away or holidays.
Desmond began by setting up an Instagram account to get the word out. Then she started sharing her story, which went slightly viral she says, with other single parents responding and saying how similar their experiences were.
“Hearing all these messages from people… all of us feel exactly the same way and have exactly the same needs but we’d been isolated in our experiences and not feeling able to be vocal and authentic about it.”
Freelance journalist Rebecca Cox counts herself as part of the community. “Single parenting can feel like the toughest, loneliest job in the world, and Frolo allows mums and dads to be part of a friendly community instantaneously. I’ve been to several Frolo group meet ups, including a Camp Bestival outing where we all camped with the kids, and the instant connection you share with fellow solo parents is fantastic,” she tells the Standard.
This community of nearly 4,000 people – they call each other Frolos – have been crucial to Desmond’s journey of creating the app. She turns to them to ask them advice, such as the decision to include a subscription fee of £5 a month to use the app.
“I did some market research, do you want it to be free or is it important to you that there is a subscription as a barrier to entry so not everyone can join? My gut feeling proved right – people prefer that there is a bit of a barrier to entry and that not everyone will just download it.”
Efforts have been made to ensure it is a secure platform too such as the use of two-factor authentication, so you need to verify logins through a mobile number as well as an email address, and new users need to do a live social video to prove they’re human in the sign-up process.
Before your mind wanders to that scene in About a Boy where Hugh Grant’s character joins a single parents group in order to hook-up with women, Desmond says there is a “zero-tolerance policy” to anything like that. “This community is a safe, positive empowering space for people and anything that jeopardises that, weird behaviour or harmful negativity, they will be removed from the app immediately and there’s a strict reporting process in place.”
The app makes money through subscriptions, and there are also plans to introduce a Premium version which will include features such as Frolo Holidays, Legal Advice, and Dating. “Frolo is definitely not a dating app but if people end up meeting through Frolo and falling in love that’s fine with me,” she says. “But not everyone is ready for dating so I think it’s nicer if dating is available in a different part of the app.”
It’s been a challenging process, with Desmond saying she’s had to “chop and change” to get to where she is today. It’s also been tough as a solo founder – she’s found not being able to bounce ideas off someone else particularly hard – but overall she says it’s liberating to be able to make decisions on her own.
“A Frolo has become a really good friend of mine. Recently we went to the park on Sunday, to the local Farmer’s market, made a roast and our kids were playing together. We just looked at each other and cheered with our glasses of rose. I said, ‘This is what Frolo dreams are made of’. And she said, ‘Zoe, this was my dream in my marriage that I never got to do’.
“So many of those types of things are happening for me and others in the community.”
Frolo is available to download on Apple App Store and Google Play Store now
