Pretend it’s June. School is out. The kids are home.
Working moms and dads need a place to park the little ones during the day while they bring home the bacon, so summer camp has become essential child care.
(NBC Universal/NBC NEWS) - Brooke Salkoff, who went by Brooke Hart when she was a correspondent for NBC, has created a Web site that she says acts as “essentially the Expedia.com or Orbitz.com of summer camps.”
Former NBC correspondent Brooke Salkoff thinks she has figured out how to offer summer camp choices on a single platform so parents can design a summer camp calendar to fill the June-to-September gap more easily than solving a Sudoku puzzle.
Salkoff, 41, rolled out her Web site, CampEasy.com, in the Washington market two weeks ago amid the high season of the annual summer camp search.
“It is one of the last, huge, billion-dollar markets that doesn’t have a platform that connects buyers and sellers,” she said, talking from her home in McLean. “The parent demand was obvious to us from the beginning.”
I am not sure if this business is going to work. It has less than $5,000 in revenue. But what sold me on Salkoff are her entrepreneurial instincts and a tenaciousness that enabled her to work her way from small-town TV stations to big-time television, where she made a six-figure salary.
“I have been toughened up for this by people who said being an entrepreneur is hard,” said Salkoff, who quit the Peacock Network in spring 2010. “But come on. I know how things happen. I am not looking for shortcuts. I know it takes baby steps.”
Salkoff, who went by Brooke Hart as a correspondent, is working the television and newspaper circuit to promote CampEasy.
She and her husband, Jonathan, a former nuclear engineer who works in telecommunications, have invested $100,000 of their own money. They are trying to raise more from individuals and from networks such as Golden Seeds, which is composed of angel investors dedicated to funding start-up companies founded and/or led by women.
The business tackles the problem parents face when selecting the right summer camps based on location, interests and length-of-stay and then scheduling the camps for their children.
Until now, parents went from Web site to Web site, scribbling numbers down or copying and pasting session times onto a spreadsheet to reconcile their children’s day-to-day summer camp schedule. That’s hard enough for one child, let alone two, three or more. Salkoff compared it to shopping on the Zappos online shoe store for three different people with three different tastes and three different shoe sizes.
CampEasy’s secret sauce is a methodology that combines all the camp information in one spot.
“It’s not a trivial matter to get hold of that data. We are essentially the Expedia.com or Orbitz.com of summer camps,” she said, referring to travel sites that allow consumers to shop for travel deals from multiple airlines.
Revenue comes from summer camps looking for exposure. Any camp gets “freemium” visibility, but to get bigger profiles and reviews and to have their contact information and Web site address posted, the camp must pay more. The three pay tiers are $49.95 a month for enhanced, $89.95 for premium and $149 for featured.
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