Company: Wish I’d Known
Founders: Emily Kucharski & Adam Kucharski
Website: https://wishidknown.co/
About Wish I’d Known
Wish I’d Known is a free community crowdsourcing new, anonymous data from a large group of parents of young children, then turning it into easy-to-digest insights with the help of AI.
We had the idea following the personal frustration we felt as new parents. What does “normal” really look like? And what has worked for others? We wanted to know what others were going through, but found it hard to get at the truth. We felt overwhelmed by contradictory schools of thought and subjective opinions. Parenting also brings with it a fear of judgement and failure, which discourages people from being completely honest. Basically, there was a lot of content but not much actual insight.
We heard the phrase ‘I wish I’d known…’ so often, which got us thinking about the steep learning curve we go on as parents – often in small bubbles, comparing to just a handful of other parents with children the same age. We started thinking, wouldn’t it be cool if you could capture all that collective experience and wisdom we acquire, at scale, and make it accessible to one another? With backgrounds in communications, research and data science, we launched Wish I’d Known last year to do just that.
Parents share their experiences anonymously across quick weekly questions, then see what a large group of other parents are doing and experiencing, personalized to their child’s age range. We cover a broad range of topics related to raising young children and parental well-being, from toys and tantrums to routines and relationships. And our Insight Library allows parents to explore past insights, with an age slider so you can ‘peek into the future’.
Almost all our questions are now user-generated, which we check and refine to ensure they’re relatable, clear, and inclusive. As well as multiple choice questions, members also share thousands of words about their experiences and hard-fought lessons, and then we use AI pipelines to synthesise these into accessible, representative summaries.
Since launching last February, we’ve grown to 1000 weekly contributors organically, through word-of-mouth, specialist influencers and collaborations with other communities who value what we’re doing. We’ve captured over half a million words and data points of collective wisdom and experience, which has enabled us to generate hundreds of insights. Crucially, 96% of active users told us that Wish I’d Known had improved their well-being in some way, with reassurance, new perspective and feeling less alone being top benefits.
Our data and insights are also delivering broader social impact. We were the insights partner for a recent parliamentary roundtable at the House of Lords, are delivering wellbeing training for top organisations, and have contributed data for NHS e-learning materials. We’ve also supported leading non-profits, including the Early Years Alliance and Maternal Mental Health Alliance, with their work. But this is just the beginning. Watch this space for more to come.
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