Say Yes with Ketshop with Mari Collins Harris

And today I am thrilled to talk to Mari Colin Harris. Mari is a passionate entrepreneur and a mother of three, and she is the founder of Ketshop, a parent approved shopping app, which I think we all can use. And Ketshop empowers kids to manage their own money in the real world transactions, which I think, Mari, you're going to have to make an adult version as well as a kid version for this, because I think we all struggle with money.

But thank you for coming to the show today. So happy to have you. Thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to talk with you today. And I'd love to get to know you just a little bit more and your background. So maybe you could talk to us about that and just what. made you create this?

Yeah. Um, so I started ketshop with my husband. Um, back during the pandemic, we were struggling because we were, we live in a [00:01:00] small town and so we weren't going to stores and you know, nobody was going to stores. But, , my son, who was five at the time, really wanted to buy everything. He wanted this toy, that toy.

And I wasn't willing to spend my money buying things that I didn't actually want in my home. But he had the chutzpah to start working. And he started, like, raking leaves and picking up and cleaning up. And I was like, ooh, I gotta, I gotta reward that. Like, you work for it, you earn the money, I will let you get whatever you want.

Not whatever you want, but you know, whatever I'm willing to let you get. So we went on Amazon and looked around. We were signed into my account and he was like, I want that. I want that. I want that. I want that. And he was just like, Oh my gosh, we came here for one thing. And you are a half a centimeter from like clicking.

By now on all these different things. It's gonna derail your goal. It's too expensive. You're signed in. It's my money [00:02:00] It just like I was standing over him saying no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no And that wasn't a good feeling. I hated it. I just wanted to be able to present him with An array of good options and then let him do the comparison shopping himself and decide how to spend his own money instead of me micromanaging every step of that transaction.

So, we looked for something that would kind of scratch that itch. And there's nothing. It was like you either get everything or you have to do it in person. And even when you're in person, there's still the same issues of wanting everything. So we created Ketshop , as a way to help families like ours teach these more responsible spending habits in a safe environment.

 I hate the no also. Like, the no this, the no that. Ugh, I hate that. Yeah, when I was a kid I was like, I'm gonna be a yes kind of parent. Like, I am not gonna be a [00:03:00] mom who just says no all the time. And I was. I try not to be, but, um, I'm really working on my yeses. But I have to say I love what you did because there, there is a big problem.

Like, it's funny because I think back when my daughter was five, we had a huge incident at the store, probably similar to what you experienced when developing this app. But your. Intuition was like, we need to find a way to correct this, solve this problem, which is what I find so inspiring about you and your story is like you had saw this problem that many, many parents are dealing with.

And you decided to fix it, solve it, and give it out to the world. That's amazing. Oh, thank you. , my way of handling the same problem that I think you did was that my daughter was five. We went to, I'm gonna say Toys R Us. We all know what that store at least was. I don't even know if they're around anymore.

She had a, like, when I say [00:04:00] meltdown, it was huge. I mean, we're talking full on tantrum in the store. It gets ugly there. It gets ugly there. And my response was, we will not return to this store until I can mentally and physically and emotionally forget what happened here. She's 17, and she's never gone back.

Never. Oh, well, they're closed now, so that was her last chance, I guess. Yeah, so we never went back. But I like the way you handled it much better with this app. So, maybe you can talk a little bit about what the app actually does, how does it work. Yeah, sure. So the way ketshop works is the parent creates an account for the family.

And that means you have a profile for a parent, which is like an admin profile. And then you can make however many profiles for kids you want. And then parents and kids can both add things to what we call a shop. And those are the things that the kid is interested in, maybe they're saving up for it. 

[00:05:00] And then the child can set a goal for themselves. Like right now, my son who's eight is saving up for a new bike. So it's, it's an expensive bike. We're helping him with it, but we are asking him to save up to 250. So he's like halfway there. So we give him money through the app for chores and for, you know, allowance, birthday money, that sort of thing.

 But the money's all virtual. So you don't need to connect a credit card. You can just be like, boom, boom, boom, boom. Or take it away if you need to, like today he bought a cookie. And so I was like, all right, 3 out of your account. So when they've reached their goal and decide to make that purchase, they can check out and 

you are able as a parent to either approve or disapprove that purchase. , so the parent always has the last word. It doesn't, doesn't matter what the kid is trying to buy. They, nothing is final until you as a parent say, yes, I'm gonna let my kid buy this. And then you check [00:06:00] out, um, eat wherever the third party places.

Sometimes it's through Amazon. Sometimes you can make your own, listing like. A trip to Disneyland or whatever. Or you could have, something that we fulfill through Ketshop as well. So when you actually check out, is your credit card then attached to that at that point, you will be emailed a link and then when you get the link, you can check out.

 For example, we have some clients their daughter is really into horseback riding. And so she wants a very specific saddle from her like horse camp place. So they took a picture of it, they upload it. , and then when she reaches the, I don't know, 800 or however much that saddle is, then her parents say, okay, you can afford it.

And then they'll go directly in person and buy that thing. So it's kind of like an IOU. In other words, yeah, which I kind of like to because honestly when my kids were making money for me, I should say another job. [00:07:00] I didn't have the money to give them. Right. So it's like, yeah, we'd earn this money. And then I'd be like, I don't have the cash.

I don't have like, can I owe you? So I liked that idea of not needing money on hand either. And that you could just keep plugging away until they're ready. Yeah. And one of the nice things about making it work this way is money is never lost. Like my kids got 20 bucks for their birthday and I found a 20 bill crumpled inside of a shoe in our entryway.

I was like, I don't know how it got there, but that's actual real money that would have been lost if Eagle Eye Mama hadn't seen it. So when you are dealing in like checks or physical money or change, it's just asking to be lost when kids can barely keep track of themselves. . And what I love about this app too, is starting from a young age, it's It's a savings plan.

So my kids are older. They're teens. So they have actual [00:08:00] cards and bank accounts, obviously, um, but like my daughter was saving towards a car, right? And that was probably the first time she's always kind of saved a little bit, but this was a big. A big thing, obviously. Yeah. Makes your purchase. It was so hard for her.

I mean, she worked two jobs. It was really, really hard for her, and I love starting this a little earlier that they can visually see versus. The way I did it, which was like, you can save and here's a, you know, a jar or something that didn't really make any sense, honestly. , but for a bigger item, even when they're that young, because as they get older and they do have things that they really want that cost a lot of money.

They'd be so much more prepared. Yeah, it's about building that financial literacy early enough in life that they understand the trade offs and understand how to keep track of their progress towards a goal. One of the other things about having a jar of change or like, you know, a 5 bill is I feel [00:09:00] like when you have money in hand you're primed to think, what can I buy for 5?

How much candy can I get for 5? If it's in an account, then you can see, Oh, I'm 5 closer to the bigger goal that I want to buy. And so, by framing it this way at a younger age, we're teaching our kids that money is something that works for them, not something to just be, spent willy nilly. So yeah, I love those, prepaid debit cards for older kids and I love the idea of like, kids working towards buying something as important as a car.

It's wonderful that she's working towards that, and my thought was, I had heard a parent say once, and this was like just golden for me. If they have a stake in the game, like they had to work. To put their money in it.

They're going to take care of that. And my theory was a car is scary because what's in the car is her and I don't want her to [00:10:00] make stupid choices. So she is going to take much better care of this car and herself because she's put so much time and effort into it. Right. She's going to take care of it.

She's not going to go drink and drive and do stupid stuff because it means so much more. I totally agree with that. I mean, I've seen that even with my own family and on a much smaller scale, but the objects that my kids have bought for themselves using their own money. They get put away, they get cleaned, they like have their own special drawers, the things that grandma and grandpa give them or things that we buy for them.

Those are the things that get left in the yard, and it rains. It's like. It doesn't have as much value because they don't feel the sacrifice to achieve that item. So I think it's great that, you know, your daughter was able to save up to buy a car and hopefully, you know, knock on wood, um, it'll make her a safer driver.

Yeah. That's the plan. We'll let you know. [00:11:00] Okay. Yeah. So what do you think is the most important thing to be teaching our children about money? I mean, I think in before we started recording, we were talking a little bit about, kids and finances. And I think one of the things that I'd really like to see is taking away that veil of, taboo that is around.

sharing your expenses. Like we talked to our kids about like how much our house cost, how much our car payments are, how much we, we sold property last year, how much money we're getting. from those payments. And it's a huge number to them that doesn't really make sense, but it also like grounds them in, okay, if we are going to go on vacation, here's how much money it costs to like rent a place.

And that takes away from the money that we were saving and et cetera, et cetera. Like we share. those bigger expenses, but [00:12:00] also the smaller ones too, like going to a grocery store and saying like, oh, we could get, you know, the expensive spaghetti or we could get the bargain spaghetti. And sometimes we get the expensive spaghetti because it's better.

And sometimes we get the bargain because we're feeding 20 people tonight. So, you know, if it's a party, you make a different choice. I love that you have those conversations because we do as well, like we talk to our kids about money. , more recently than I would say at your younger kids age, I think like if we couldn't afford something, we would just kind of hide it when they were younger, you know, like, ah, you don't need that.

Or we don't, you know, but now we actually have the conversations of, listen, this is what our expenses look like. Yeah, we actually make and this is what you're asking of us. Do you know? I don't know if that's so good, but what I've noticed is a huge shift in my kids. Cause [00:13:00] they both can work now. I have teens, they're working and I see them asking less of us and more of like, well, let me just take an extra shift.

So, cause I want that. My son loves food shopping with me. Sometimes I just like to go by myself, honestly, because it's time alone. And I don't want to have to grab those extra things. Kind of like your ketshop, right? For food shopping, I didn't want on my list, but now I tell him here's our budget today for food shopping.

This is what we're going to get. We're planning for the, just the next three, four days, not a lifetime. We can come back and this is how much I'd like to spend today. And he actually will take his calculator out and make sure, Hey mom, we hit the top, we hit it, we got to stop. 

So I think it is an important skill and I think they need to know because they have no idea how much those shopping trips cost. They have no idea how much household expenses cost. And I'm not saying every kid needs to be bothered with that, but it's good to have an idea so that when they are asking for the bigger things that are [00:14:00] just not fitting in, they also have this, you know, they, they know, they understand, and they also start to learn how to plan on their own too.

Yeah, yeah, I totally agree. I think Having kids involved in those kind of family decisions too, , is really important, you know, and I think as a society we don't give our kids enough credit for being the smart little people they are like they can figure out a lot more than we think they can. If we just let them know and include them in those decisions , maybe the kids won't be deciding which car we buy, or, you know, which house we buy but they can definitely weigh in on, which Airbnb we're going to rent for this vacation like is it worth it to spend the extra money to have a hot tub.

 It's funny because I originally would expect my kids to just be like, I want the hot tub, no matter what, you know, having that kind of an attitude of like, it's not my money, [00:15:00] let's spend it. But since we've been involving them in these like family discussions, sometimes they're like, you know what, we're going to be close to the beach.

We don't need a hot tub. It's fine. And I'm like, Oh yeah, you, you're like doing some cost benefit analysis here. And seeing that skill developing at such a young age is so awesome. And it's true because it also starts to talk about what's important to them. And like what I think might be important for the vacation, like the hot tub, that costs maybe much more, that I feel like I need to have.

They might like be like, yeah, I don't want to even use that. And it kind of helps in that decision of what we really do spend our finances on. as a family. So that's, it is important to include them to that. Now, as we talk about money, I find money is a little bit of a taboo area to talk when you're talking about it with friends.

It's like, we don't do that. , as friends, we never talk about our [00:16:00] finances. It's almost like a dirty little thing that nobody wants to talk about. And I think there's a lot of. feelings associated to it, whether it's like worthiness or shame or feeling showy or whatever it is. But when you're developing a product like you did and you need to actually like sell it, were there like any limiting beliefs that you kind of hit on for yourself that you had to overcome to get your product out there?

You know, I don't think the limiting beliefs were necessarily around money. Because The way Ketshop works, you can set it up however your family has, or however your family values money. If you guys are kind of like big spenders, you want to have the nicest stuff, you want to have the coolest toys, the most updated, iPads and everything, Great, like put that stuff on your list.

And if you are a little bit more conscious of like how you're spending your money you want to be a little thriftier [00:17:00] Great, but you know the more the better deals into your shop. For me one of the most difficult things Creating this app was letting go of control. When I first started, I wanted to control everything.

And I actually developed the idea around like controlling my son, controlling the choices he could see, controlling, like, I don't want him to see ads. So we're going to create a place where there's no ads. I don't want him to like. See the stuff made in China. I don't want him to see the toys that aren't green.

And so I had this very narrow approach to how I wanted. His experience to be and I translated that across all of the other families who might be using it as well. I'm like, oh, parents are only going to want green toys. They're only going to want stem toys. They're only going to want like locally made high quality objects.

You know, they're going to need packaging that comes with like a little bonus something. It was just, I wanted so much control. [00:18:00] And as time went on, you know, like the horse saddle situation. I'm, I can't stock a horse saddle. I can't stock like a trip to Disneyland. And people kept telling me, Hey, I love this idea, but I don't like the products or the products aren't what we're looking for.

These don't my kids. And so I had to like, kind of release this very narrow focus of control and be like, okay, I'm going to create a hammer. You can use it to pound a nail, but you can also use it to remove a nail. You can use it for a host of different, purposes, and it doesn't have to be just the thing that I need it for.

 So yeah, the releasing control, both of my own family and of the app itself, has been a struggle for me. Control is, is difficult to overcome, honestly, it's easier when you know, here are my choices, and I like all these choices for my family, so whatever they pick is good, but [00:19:00] I think that's a healthy practice that that you did do, which is great because you were flexible.

It may have been really hard for you to do, but you were flexible. And because of that, your product is doing better well, I mean, I think releasing control is just a big part of parenthood in general. You know, it, it reminded me very much of having a newborn and being like, I'm doing all the things that the book said, why isn't this baby sleeping?

Come on. And just realizing, you know, it's part of the process. And you can't control everything. You can just do the best you can. Yeah, I love that. Now, how do you feel ketshop has impacted your family? I have noticed first off that we don't bicker as much. There used to be a lot more begging in our house.

A lot of like, can you buy me this? Can I have that? Like get me this. And now we're able to just say yes. With a little asterisk that's like, if you can afford it, you [00:20:00] can buy it for yourself using your own money on Ketshop it's been really cool because my kids want the things they want, but they're spending their own money that they worked hard to get.

And so I don't say no anymore. Like, yeah, we have more stuffed animals in our house than I would probably like to have. But it's a phase, you know, it's not going to last forever. And I think it's also a lesson because my, my middle child, um, is just every two weeks, she'll want to spend money on some kind of rainbow unicorn plushy creature, like you have a whole.

bucket of rainbow unicorn plushie creatures. And she's like, yeah, but they're lonely and they need a friend. Like, all right, well, it's your money. You know, like I go out to dinner and I spend money on things that I don't need. So, All right. Go ahead. Right. And then she's learning. Eventually, she'll realize I have 30 unicorn fluffy [00:21:00] things.

 I do, I do limit the storage. I'm like, you can buy whatever you want, but it has to fit in this box. Because if it doesn't fit in the box, something else has got to go. Just because it drives me absolutely insane to have. like toys everywhere. I think I'm probably not the only parent who has struggled with that like intrusion of kids stuff into every single space.

Yeah, you have to have at least one room you can go to that doesn't have any of that. Yeah, 

 so, what would you say to a mom who is, like, has an idea like you? Where they, they had a problem, whatever it is, because there's lots of issues in parenting, right? And they have this great idea and they want to maybe move forward and let the world know but they're just either too afraid or they don't feel like they have the resources to do it.

What advice would you give them? I would say connect with other people. I wish I'd done more of that early on because it would have saved me a lot of Pitfalls along the [00:22:00] way. I spent a lot of time developing what I thought other people needed instead of talking to other people and then creating, more siphoned down version of the app, which is.

where we are now. But, you know, my original idea was much bigger. It had, you know, a chores app, it had a messaging app, it had like, it had a lot of pieces. And then I saw the price tag of developing it and I was like, oh, okay, well, let's slash and burn this because I don't need to reinvent the wheel on a lot of things that exist.

So I think if I'd been talking to more families earlier on, I could have saved myself probably a year's worth of development time. the other piece of advice I would give is think about where your strengths are and focus on those and then find someone who can compliment you on your weaknesses.

For example, I had a past life as an infographic designer, so I'm pretty good at [00:23:00] like, Thinking about complex things and then putting them into a more concise. visual that where people can understand it better. So the user interface design became pretty easy for me and thinking about, you know, how the flow should go.

, the graphics were fun to do, but I don't have technical chops. And so my husband, he is a developer and he did, you know, all the backend stuff I say I'm the steering wheel and he's the motor. So, I decide where we're going and he makes us get there. But yeah, I couldn't, I couldn't have done any of that without having someone who could compliment my skills.

I love that analogy. I think a lot of times, especially as women, like we just want to be able to do things like on our own, like I could do this and, you know, it's overwhelming and to ask for help is. A good thing and to team up with people who either have done it or with people who can, I guess, be the motor

Is really [00:24:00] helpful. Yeah, for sure. So where can people find you but also find ketshop? Yeah. Can find ketshop at. www. ketshop. com. K E T S H O P. We're also on Instagram and Facebook as ketshop. app. But yeah, you can download the app or just use it on the web, and I would love to hear feedback from any users, good or bad.

I'm always trying to, you know, collect information and make things better. So, it'd be great to hear feedback. So what else would you like people that are listening today know about you or about the app?

 I guess I would like people to know that you don't have to reinvent the wheel when it comes to teaching your kids to be responsible. I think there's a lot of people out there that are looking on. Pinterest [00:25:00] or on mommy blogs or reading books about how to teach your kid to be personally responsible or financially responsible.

And you're weaving in like, I have my chore chart and I have the, the things that my kid It can expect to get and the things that I expect from them and everyone is trying to craft their own unique method, but there's so many different ways out there that you end up with kind of a mishmash. So one thing about developing ketshop is it's been kind of a one shot deal for our family where You know, that's how we get our kids to do chores.

That's how we pay them for the chores. And that's how they get the things that they want, including like school supplies and stuff. So, when you find something that works. Just roll with it. You don't have to keep improving on every single thing. 

And I know I've tried a lot of things for chores. And it for me, it all failed. [00:26:00] Honestly, I wish my kids were a little younger because I would have tried this. But. I feel like it all failed. And the one thing that worked for me, honestly, was that I just gave up and I stopped doing stuff for them. So that is once again, not the ideal, but yeah, I just stopped doing their laundry.

So they did it, I think that's a great technique, honestly, because they're not going to have you forever. You know, it's like by stopping doing their laundry, you're weaning them from. Being cared for 100%. It's like, all right, you're going to be cared for 90%.

I do think your app might be a better tool to at least wean into that versus cold turkey but yeah, I think that's true. Well, thank you so much for coming on and for creating something that the world can really use to help with these struggles that we all are dealing with with our kids.

So thank you. Well, thank you for having me on. It was [00:27:00] such a delight talking with you.