Meet The Atlanta Founder Helping Military Families Find Their "Sidekicks"

Families across the country struggle to find affordable, quality childcare. But millions of military families have extra considerations that can make finding childcare even more difficult, says Atlanta-based founder Shelly Scott.

Those in the military are often moving to new cities and criss crossing the nation, making it difficult to build relationships with childcare providers. They are also navigating the additional stress of having a parent being sent out on an uncertain or long overseas deployment.

Scott saw an opportunity to connect military families together to solve the crucial childcare gap. So she launched GetSidekicks to do just that.

At its core, GetSidekicks is a marketplace connecting affordable, vetted, and verified military-related child care providers with military families in need of short-term care. This allows families to connect exclusively with veterans, guards, reservists, and military spouses who understand their unique child care challenges.

Scott describes GetSidekicks as a “support networking” platform for those in the military. After signing up, users are given a curated list of caregivers, known as Sidekicks, based on their specific childcare needs for that point in time.

The goal is to help military families build out a “squad” of caregivers that can jump in and help, Scott added. GetSidekicks currently has its waitlist up as it prepares to launch the next iteration of the platform.

From Silicon Valley To GetSidekicks

Scott wasn’t always in the startup world. After graduating from UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, Scott started her corporate career as an investment analyst in Nairobi, Kenya. She found her way to one of Silicon Valley’s largest software companies, Intuit. For over a decade, she served in various management roles across the firm, ultimately creating Intuit's first business unit focused on building partnerships with the largest companies in the world. She was integral in rolling out Quickbooks Self-Employed and what would become Intuit Financing.

After building her career in Silicon Valley, the “Covid Exodus” brought her and her young family back to the State of Georgia.

There is a lot that can be said about how different the startup and the corporate world can be. But Scott said her time at Intuit helped shape how she thinks about building an early-stages of GetSidekicks. Particularly, it helped her understand how to give 360 degree feedback and how to resolve conflict — two things essential for getting a new venture and team off the ground.

After building the “duct tape” MVP version of GetSidekicks herself with “WordPress, HubSpot, email, and a spreadsheet,” Scott went out to recruit the right co-founders to build and scale the marketplace. She used Intuit’s strategy of bringing together “a designer, a visionary, and a hacker” to work on a new idea. She used that model to find her co-founders Joe Dennis and Nate Whitaker — both former Intuit managers — who officially joined earlier this month.

Building Tech For Military Communities

While not directly in the military or part of a military family, Scott grew up in the very military-heavy town of Warner Robins, Georgia. Over the last few years, she found her passion for building technology designed to help military families. That passion is apparent when you talk to her about the platform she is building.

“People outside of the military think that the DoD (Department of Defense) takes care of everything. But that just isn’t the case,” she said.

In fact, the DoD often looks to civilian populations for solutions, creating strong opportunities for entrepreneurs.

While Scott learned a lot about building products and teams while out in the Bay Area, she said Atlanta is the right place to scale.

"Military families face unique challenges and in my opinion these have often gone overlooked," she added. "GetSidekicks is making life easier by creating a future centered on enabling families to build a support system in minutes, instead of months so no matter where they are in the world."