HighScore House Turns Chores and Challenges into Fun for Kids and Less Stress for Parents

HighScore House is a family product, a tool for parents that uses game design to motivate kids to take on new challenges in their day.

It’s an online game for tracking offline actions, where kids earn stars that they can redeem for real rewards, like extra TV time or a new bike. The game isn’t just fun, it helps teach kids valuable lessons about delayed gratification and goal setting. HighScore House is also a support tool for parents providing help, validation and making it easier to be consistent while reducing household stress. HighScore House was founded in January 2011.

The founders are Theo Ephraim and Kyle Seaman. The company is based in Montreal and will be presenting at Startup Festival.

NextMontreal: What opportunity did you see in the market that made you decide to start HighScore House?

Kyle: We were fascinated by recent innovations around applying game mechanics to non-traditional environments, especially in making positive change offline. We realized there were very few people using these ideas in the parenting space, even though it seemed like such a natural fit.

A more macro view makes the parenting market an extremely attractive space to enter. Mobile technology and constant Internet access is now commonplace, bringing more tools but also more distractions to families, who are busier than ever. We saw a lot of opportunities in a range of verticals to really help families, and an opportunity to align our own passions with real customer problems.

NextMontreal: How are you guys funded?

Kyle: We received seed funding from Year One Labs. We joined the Lab in January of this year, both founders having known the Year One partners for awhile. Being a part of the Lab has been an amazing experience that will for sure shape the rest of our lives.

Disclosure: I’m a Founding Partner at Year One Labs, which means I’m an investor in HighScore House.

NextMontreal: What’s the competition like in the space?

Kyle: It’s a very interesting space with many players but no direct competitors. The competition and product spectrum ranges from huge virtual worlds like Club Penguin and Moshi Monsters focused on safe entertainment, to online allowance trackers like Three Jars and FamZoo, which focus totally on money management. We see ourselves in the middle of the spectrum; not a full-on virtual world and not a boring online bank for kids. HighScore House is a fun way to track responsibilities while developing habits of savings and delayed gratification, but without being boring or directly involving money.

The problem with the two ends of the spectrum is that it’s either a product driven by kids (games) or by parents (chore charts). We are building a family oriented product where both parents and children are involved and benefit in different ways.

NextMontreal: What have you learned so far in early testing with parents about how they and their children react to Highscore House?

Kyle: We didn’t realize the significance of introducing a defined set of “rules” and structure into a family’s routine. After testing with the first families we were amazed by what parents and kids were doing, now that they had an agreed framework to work within. We had families telling us that arguments turned into discussions and that the begging stopped completely.

One family told us how they decided to experiment using “kindness” as a task. One common mistake made using incentive systems is making tasks too general, as it’s not clear what constitutes “kindness”. But every night over dinner, the family made a point to discuss what they had each done during the day that was kind, in order to earn their stars. The parents even found themselves reflecting on the day. We learned that when you give a family the proper platform, very interesting things will come out of it.

NextMontreal: How have reactions been so far from parents and kids?

Kyle: Parents and kids love it. We get a lot of families emailing us stories like: “my son/daughter is running upstairs right now to make their bed — I haven’t even finished setting this up yet!”, or “The bathroom has never been so clean!”.

Parents that have tried charts and other software consistently tell us that HighScore House is the easiest to use by far. Kids love the fun interface and having their own “room” in the game. Rather than having to use a chart hung on the wall by their parents, they can be more self directed in their actions and feel some empowerment in earning their rewards.

NextMontreal: How do you plan on making money?

Kyle: We see three main opportunities for making money. (1) Monthly subscription of ~$5 per family, similar to a Club Penguin membership. (2) Affiliate sales on the rewards given by parents. We are positioning ourselves to become the broker for what kids want, whether that’s media, games, or physical goods. (3) Advertising and offers. We have separated the child and parent interfaces on the site, and with the great data we are collecting we will be able to safely deliver highly relevant advertisements and offers to parents in a unique way.

NextMontreal: What’s been your top lesson learned so far?

Kyle: We were never short for excuses on why we shouldn’t push a certain release, but we learned quickly the value of getting something in front of the customer. In May we had only been developing since late March and we knew there were flaws and missing features, but we decided to release anyway. It made a big difference and we quickly learned where we should actually be focusing our efforts. We were even able to skip some of the features that had originally been holding us up. Users are pretty understanding too, and at the beta stage, good enough goes a long way.

NextMontreal: What’s your #1 challenge at this point?

Kyle: Engaging kids long-term. Even though we are marketing first to parents, kids will be the ones who decide whether HighScore House becomes a part of their family life in the long-term. Capturing their interest for more then a few weeks is a challenge even for the best games. We have some really great changes coming with our update to the child interface, which we hope will get kids much more excited about HighScore House. It will bring a new level of interactivity and engagement, which based on feedback, is what kids are really looking for.

NextMontreal: What’s your #1 piece of advice for other startups?

Kyle: Write it down. This is the single best thing we’ve learned from building HighScore House. It was the difference between us killing this idea and realizing there really is an amazing opportunity. We finally started writing down and revising our ideas (pitch, assumptions, goals) daily. It really puts everyone on the same page, and putting something into words forces you to make real decisions.

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