The new Famville app: The must-have for young families in NRW!

The new Famville app: The must-have for young families in NRW!

Alena Giwojna, a 34-year-old with a doctorate in molecular biology, launched the Famville app at the end of February 2023. This innovative application aims to help parents find suitable events and things to do for their families. The idea for Famville came about during her part-time MBA program at WHU and is the result of her own challenges as a new mother during the pandemic. Alena, who previously worked in cancer research, decided to take the entrepreneurial route due to the difficulties in implementing her ideas in industry.

Famville allows parents to match their children's interests, ages and language backgrounds, and the application provides a platform to organize playdates and make new friends. Among active users, 90% report similar barriers to their families' leisure activities, highlighting the need for such a practical solution. Alena invested 14,000 euros from the NRW start-up grant to develop a minimum viable product (MVP) and validate marketability. So far, the app has had over 400 downloads and 200 active users.

Functions and goals of Famville

The Famville app offers a variety of features aimed at reducing the mental load on parents. It allows you to discover family-friendly activities in the area, such as flea markets, festivals and sporting events. Users can create their own playdates or meetings and make planning more efficient without having to have long chats. The app also attaches great importance to data protection, so that users can decide for themselves who can see their events.

Famville is currently limited to Düsseldorf, Bonn and Cologne events, but Alena plans to expand the app in the future. Their overall goal is to develop Famville into a “parenting ecosystem” that offers a similar user experience to Uber.

The context for supporting families

Apps like Famville play an essential role in parents' everyday lives, as they not only help save time and money, but also simplify the organization of family life. According to an article on familie.de, there are several useful apps that make everyday family life easier. This includes, for example, Vinted app for buying and selling used children's things or the Tasty app, which makes meal planning easy with over 3,000 recipes. Such applications are helpful in meeting the high demands and stressful everyday lives of modern families.

With her app Famville, Alena Giwojna is at the forefront of a movement that supports parents in networking and leisure activities. With a growing team of seven volunteers, she is constantly optimizing the application and is already thinking about future monetization strategies to further expand the services. The commitment behind Famville reflects the unceasing desire to offer parents valuable support in the often overwhelming everyday family life.