Today’s guest is Sara Tateno, founder of Happity – the platform helping parents find baby & toddler classes while powering thousands of small but mighty businesses behind them. Sara didn’t come from tech, but a second pregnancy, a house move and the panic of “how will I cope this time?” led her to spot a huge, overlooked problem: why was it still so hard to find local classes in the age of smartphones and slick consumer apps? With a management consulting background, Sara could see the commercial opportunity instantly... millions of children, hundreds of classes per neighbourhood, and class providers trying to scale with no proper booking, data or marketing tools. But the people feeling this pain were new parents without access to capital or tech skills. So she decided to become the technical founder herself. In this conversation, Sara shares how she went from BBC strategy to Google’s startup incubator for parents, discovered coding through a “bring your baby” learn-to-code group, and then enrolled in an intense 12‑week bootcamp while her husband took shared parental leave. She built the first version of Happity herself, pulled in classmates to help, and used that prototype to prove there was both a deep emotional need (maternal mental health, community, connection) and a serious global business. We talk about what it really looked like to build a remote-first, flexible company pre‑pandemic, not as a lifestyle perk, but as a way to access incredible, often “overqualified” talent who were being locked out of traditional roles because of rigid working patterns. Sara shares the reality of recruiting parents hungry for meaningful work, the uncomfortable dynamic of turning down high-calibre applicants for low-paid roles, and how that revealed just how broken the flexible work market really was. We also get into the messy bits: launching the site while her daughter was in and out of hospital with appendicitis and how those moments forced her to recalibrate boundaries around family time, school holidays and presence at home. We explore how she and her co-founder restructured their own work to protect both the business and their mental health – and why she believes founders and investors need to talk far more honestly about burnout, caregiving and sustainability. Finally, we zoom out to the industry. Sara unpacks the “cutesy” stigma around businesses focused on babies and mums, and why the term “mompreneur” has been so dismissive of entrepreneurs running genuinely large, often international operations in this space. She explains why impact community, maternal mental health and connection isn’t a side-story but the backbone of Happity’s commercial strategy, and how investor attitudes to “impact + returns” have shifted since they first started fundraising. We also dive into: How a Google incubator for parents and a remote accelerator opened doors that would otherwise have stayed shutWhy learning to code changed Sara’s mindset as a founder and why “I don’t know yet, but I’ll figure it out” is the ultimate entrepreneurial skillWhat it’s really like to go through an intensive bootcamp with a newborn at home – and why she doesn’t romanticise itThe trade-offs, mistakes and course corrections she’s made as a mum and founder (including the ones she still thinks about)Why 97% of Happity’s traffic is organic and what that says about building products that meet a truly urgent needThe nuances of marketing to mums: clarity over fluff, “trusted friend” over judgement, and brutally honest usefulness over cutesy pastel brand-speakThis is a powerful, unvarnished look at how Sara built a serious tech business from the most “domestic” of problems and why motherhood can be a catalyst for bigger, not smaller, ambitions.
