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Cubby Notes' Entrepreneurs Launch Daily Nanny

Published Wednesday Dec 13, 2017

Author MATTHEW J. MOWRY


Dave and Jen Coffin, founders of Cubby Notes and Daily Nanny. Photo by Matthew J. Mowry.


Dave and Jen Coffin are on a mission to help parents better communicate with the people who care for their children, from nannies to childcare centers.

The Dover couple is like many busy families—they juggle two full-time jobs (Jen in marketing and Dave in web development) and two kids (Noah, 1, and Ellie, 3). Anyone who has rushed into day care to pick up a child knows there’s not a lot of time to talk to teachers if they are even still there. That makes communication about a child’s day difficult.

So when they still only had one child, back in 2015, the couple decided to develop an app, Cubby Notes, to give caregivers and parents one place to share information and improve the care that children receive.

Since the birth of Noah and switching from a day care to a nanny, the couple found communication can still be difficult. In response, they developed a new app called Daily Nanny, which works much like Cubby Notes but aimed at meeting the needs of parents with nannies.

Cubby Notes gives caregivers an easy way to track information, share photos and communicate with parents on a daily basis. And the app has been used at Seacoast Community School, UNH Child Study and Development Center and NHTI, Concord’s Community College, as well as the Child & Family Development Center.

Cubby Notes and the couple were accepted into Alpha Loft’s 2016 Accelerate NH program, which aims to help startups accelerate their growth. (They learned they were accepted into the program within an hour of Noah’s birth.) The couple also won Live Free and Start’s “Ultimate NH Connection” Tech Startup Competition. The prize included a meeting with then-Gov. Maggie Hassan as well as a roundtable of Live Free and Start Advisory Council members, industry experts and child care professionals to help connect the Coffins with resources to grow their business.

It was after that meeting that the couple decided to expand Cubby Notes and add the Daily Nanny. Another change they learned was essential was switching from a web-based app to a mobile app. “Nannies don’t have time to log in. They just need to open an app,” Jen Coffin says.

The mobile Daily Nanny app, which was beta tested with 10 families, has seen steady downloads since its launch, Dave Coffin says.

And Daily Nanny is a two-way street. In addition to allowing nannies to communicate what is going on in real time, parents can give the nanny information in advance about naps, medicine dosages and instructions, diaper change information, meal details and more.

“Parents can customize what they get notifications about,” Jen says. The app allows nannies and parents to easily track hours as nannies can clock in and out through the app. It also allows them to access work histories, know when overtime pay is necessary and add or delete shifts.

Plus nannies can share photos with parents, and the app will eventually allow video sharing. Chat threads can be created among everyone connected through the app as parents can add friends or family to the list of people who receive notifications.

“It allows you to foster a better relationship with your nanny,” Dave says. It also puts expectations in place about what needs to be communicated, Jen adds.

Jen says they are constantly getting feedback from users, which they use to tweak the app. And they use their own lives to inform development of the app. “We are the market of who we are trying to market it to,” she says. For more information visit dailynannyapp.com or  dailynannyapp.com/cubbynotes.

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