Interview with Hoopla’s CEO – Jacqueline Perrottet

Our latest interview is with Jacqueline Perrottet, founder & CEO of Hoopla. As you're about to read for yourself, she wants to help the children and their parents "deal" with modern technologies — all while bringing them together. Instead of saying "smartphones are the problem," Hoopla's approach is to use these powerful tools for good. And we like that approach. Here's what Jacqueline had to say...

Can you tell us a bit more about yourself? What's your background?

I have a marketing and branding background, I worked for an agency and we worked with a lot of startups and so that's kind of where I got my first taste of startup life and realized that I had a lot of ideas that I wanted to pursue as well. And so that's why I started hoopla and then hoopla Kind of came to me from a personal need.

I've always had anxiety, and I didn't really know how to manage it. And now, with two young kids, I want to make sure that they have resources that I didn't have. So that's where the idea came from to begin with.

Let's speak about Hoopla. What is the market problem you want to solve and where do you see the opportunity?

Once I realized it was a personal need for me, but then I started reaching out to other parents, trying to figure out what resources and tools they used, and they were looking for the same thing. And so then, when I started doing even more research and finding the horrible statistics about the mental health crisis in younger generations, I realized that this was such a big problem.

It was really global and then I was searching for tools, a lot of tools weren't very accessible or weren't very affordable, and I realized that we can do so much with the phone. It's always in our pocket. It's so accessible.

However, so many people are focusing on how it's the problem. And it's one of the biggest contributors, if not causes, just mental health crises in children.

Instead of focusing on the problem, we want to make it part of the solution as well because we don't think that smartphones aren't going anywhere. So we might as well try to incorporate it into our daily lives and teach healthy tech habits in the family setting because it can do a lot.

If you don't focus on games and video, we can use them in different ways and still see benefits.

What are the features differentiating your offering from competitors?

What makes us different is that we're combining features and traditional apps for children. But all of our content is supposed to be done with the parent and the child together. It's supposed to be a point of connection rather than a barrier because what we've seen with our competitors like Moshi, for example, is they kind of segment their content for children and parents separately, so they might have resources for parents and then content for children.

But, we found that parents want to limit screen time, whereas children just want videos and games.

So, what we want to do is to create something where you start on the app, but then it continues into other parts of your daily life. It's like a mental wellness routine, five minutes a day.

Another big differentiator for us is that we use haptic feedback (vibration) to create different tactile sensations, and this mimics physical sensory toys — which are often marketed for children with special needs. But they have common effects, with vibration coming to the nervous system to reduce anxiety.

Because we can mimic these toys, we can create different types of sensations when children are holding the phone. For example, a heartbeat can match the pattern that you're feeling and that can have a huge calming effect for a child if they're in a stressful situation like at the dentist or the doctor's office. They don't necessarily have to have an anxiety problem — they just may be in a situation that might make them a bit nervous.

Can you share some numbers and achievements of the business?

We launched our Beta subscription version in July and we have about a thousand users. This is all organic growth and we also have a pretty good conversion rate because we have a lot of referrals through healthcare professionals. These are just healthcare professionals who have reached out to us or they've helped us create content and they're actively recommending it to their families.

These are mostly child psychologists, occupational therapists, as well as teachers. We also work with alternative therapy providers, like art therapy and music therapy.

Because we have this holistic approach, there are a lot of professionals who are recommending our app,

What are your medium-term plans?

One thing that we're focused on is creating some physical items that will complement our digital tools. We decided to go this route because we participate in different events and have seen that something like that would work.

At one point, we made a hoopla box, and we just showed everyday items that people probably have in their homes already, like different types of sensory toys (i.e., pop-it), keychains, and so on. But then we show how it can be used and more of a therapeutic approach.

Child psychologists are teaching parents how to use such items as a calming tool or to teach different types of emotional regulation.

Do you have some advice for other entrepreneurs in the digital health space in MENA?

I would advise digital health entrepreneurs and startups to be patient as things are still evolving in the region. There is a huge potential, but some time will be needed for the local authorities to adopt the latest technologies beyond the existing health infrastructure. Still, this is a promising region that keeps growing every year.