When Dominique Elkind became a mother, she noticed a lack of third spaces available to parents of very young children. While on her second maternity leave, Dominique decided to take on a entrepreneurial venture vastly different from her career as a UX Designer, by founding Nixi City, a play centre for children aged 0-5. Not only is Nixi City a space for children, but includes a cafe for parents to meet and connect.
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Episode 29 – Dominique Elkind, Nixi City
[00:00:55] Sanjay Parekh: Today's guest is Dominique Elkind, a user-centric designer based out of Seattle. However, today, we're not going to be talking about user centric design — well, we might a little bit — but we're going to be discussing Dominique's recent entrepreneurial journey with the founding of Nixi City, a children's play space that supports critical thinking, independence, and confidence.
Dominique, welcome to the show.
[00:01:21] Dominique Elkind: Thank you. Glad to be here.
[00:01:23] Sanjay Parekh: I'm excited to have you on because, well, honestly, all of us were kids at one point, but some of us have kids now too. It's really interesting what you're doing, but before we get into all of that about Nixi City, give us a little bit about your background and what got you to where you are today.
[00:01:39] Dominique Elkind: Yeah, sure. So, I live in Seattle, Washington. I've lived here for about 15 years. I moved here from Kansas City, Missouri. I moved here as a designer at a tech startup that eventually went public. And then was eventually also acquired. It was a company bought by Salesforce. And then I worked as a designer at a number of other startups here in the Seattle area, as well as some larger companies.
And the last place that I was at before I started my company was Google, so yeah.
[00:02:13] Sanjay Parekh: So last place you were, so that means no full-time job. Now you're all in on the new thing.
[00:02:20] Dominique Elkind: So, I do still have my full time job.
[00:02:22] Sanjay Parekh: Okay. So, you do have your full time job. Okay. You made it sound like you didn't.
So this is a side hustle for you then.
[00:02:27] Dominique Elkind: It is. So, I'm actually a big proponent of the business school adage of keep your side hustle as long as possible. And I know a lot of my friends who are founders really believe, and I think this is true for some companies where you really have to go all in and you really can't divert your attention.
But I think for this type of business and for what I'm doing, and also the fact that I'm on maternity leave makes it really easy to really have a side hustle like this. And use the time off in these maternity leave breaks and like leverage that to start a business like this.
[00:03:06] Sanjay Parekh: Yeah, that's a great life hack there that I don't think we've heard on this podcast before. Use your maternity leave as a way to start a new business, a new side hustle. That's definitely a new one. So is this your first time, then, doing something entrepreneurial like this? It sounds like you've been at entrepreneurial things, but is this your first time doing it yourself?
[00:03:30] Dominique Elkind: Yes and no. So, when I was at Google, we had an internal startup incubator. And so, I co-founded a team inside of Google and we eventually got acquired by a larger team. And so that's technically not a startup, but also sort of a startup, but this is the first time that I'm doing it on my own, my own funding.
[00:03:57] Sanjay Parekh: Yeah. Yeah. So, that team, it was acquired by another team inside of the same company? Is that the way that it worked?
[00:04:06] Dominique Elkind: Yeah, it was really a cool program. So, it was called Area 120. And so, it was meant for people who worked at the company who were entrepreneurial, and you could pitch ideas. You could work with executives and leaders to figure out what they wanted to basically see or invest in.
So, it worked like you had this internal kind of venture capital firm inside the company. And so, if you got funding, you essentially got six months of runway at a time to basically launch your startup. And so, if you failed, the stakes were, medium-ish, I would say, because if your startup failed, you essentially had to find another job or team inside of Google.
But while you were inside the incubator, and it's been through various permutations, but you essentially got you know your salary. So, it was a little bit of an it was a nice way to dip your toe into an entrepreneurial venture.
[00:05:15] Sanjay Parekh: Yeah, as you well know with the new side hustle. Yeah, there's nobody that pays your salary when you're starting up your own thing.
Did you have any entrepreneurs in the family that you've seen over time? Is there an entrepreneurial streak that you're running this on? Or are you the first one to venture out in the family to be an entrepreneur?
[00:05:39] Dominique Elkind: So, my family is pretty creative. And my background, I started off my career as an artist. I went to school for painting.
I got my degree as an artist and then became a UX designer, digital designer, brand designer. And my dad was an artist and writer and a musician. So not technically an entrepreneur, but sort of. My mom was a hairdresser and a makeup artist, so she did her own thing. A lot of creative people in my family.
My great grandma was a seamstress, a dress maker. So, a lot of like small business, entrepreneurial people.
[00:06:20] Sanjay Parekh: Okay, that's awesome. That's awesome. Okay, so, tell us about the new thing and what exactly it is.
[00:06:27] Dominique Elkind: Yeah, so it is a kids’ play space with a cafe slash bar for parents to hang out at and it's really meant to be this fun third place away from your home or your work where you can go hang out, let your kids kind of run wild and not really worry about having them run loose. When I was on maternity leave for the first time a couple years ago, I realized how hard it was to find spaces just anywhere, where I could go and have a drink or hang out or just meet someone.
And I talked to a lot of other parents who were experiencing very similar things where it's just really difficult to find somewhere to go that was not just this place where, "Oh, you could bring your kids, but it's going to be really difficult and they're going to mess everything up and they're not really welcome."
And also, a place where it was rooted in. So, the business, the design of the space and the play area is really rooted in this Montessori approach. So, things are hand built mostly out of wood and like soft fabric materials, all of the like toys and games. It's really meant to be a detachment away from screen time.
So you can have that place for your kid to run and get some movement and play time that's not rooted in screens.
[00:08:07] Sanjay Parekh: Yeah, it's interesting that you say all this because you're in Seattle, the mecca of coffee shops, right? Because Starbucks, that is the headquarters, the start of it and the fact that you felt this, maybe it's not unwelcomeness, but not appropriateness, of those places, is interesting.
You're going through this process. Was this something that people told you they needed or did they just express that there wasn't a place and they didn't know what to do? Like, how did you figure out that this was a problem?
[00:08:42] Dominique Elkind: Yeah, so I did a number of kind of rounds of research to figure out like what I wanted to do with the business and how I wanted to start it.
Initially, I did a number of surveys. I talked to potential customers, friends, other parents that I knew. And I found a number of problem spaces. One was just lack of childcare in general or backup care. And so, one of the initial ideas was like this place where you could have backup care.
But then another problem that I saw was just a lack of, even more simply than that, as I was diving into what I could potentially do and what I had the skill set to really do. Because one thing I was concerned about was, I'm not really skilled at providing child care, nor do I think I really want to do that, but maybe eventually the space could do that. But one of the things I also heard was there's also this lack of place to have a kid's party or just go and just go and play or have a play date.
There's a couple of different places and then the more I looked into it, there's a bunch of these kind of concept play cafes in Europe and South Korea. And not a ton here in Seattle at all. There's a few popping up in the United States, but they're all like these mom-and-pop shops. So, it just struck me as an interesting kind of concept. There are people doing this, and it's seeing a lot of success because we all have, those of us who have kids, are looking for places to go just don't have a ton of options and then particularly here in Seattle, it rains a lot obviously.
[00:10:37] Sanjay Parekh: I've never heard that before about Seattle, that's new information!
[00:10:40] Dominique Elkind: (Laughter) Yeah, and if it's not raining, it's freezing. So, I think there are a lot of places in the United States where you know you might have a really nice outdoor park. And we have some of those too, but I don't use them all too often because it's raining or it's miserable outside. I don't want to stand outside and get wet.
Yeah, that was the impetus for starting something like that.
[00:11:03] Sanjay Parekh: So, based on the way you're talking, is the idea that this is not going to be a mom-and-pop thing? It's going to be something that you franchise out or build out a network.
What are you thinking about the future for yourself?
[00:11:15] Dominique Elkind: Yeah, I'm trying not to get too far ahead with the vision, but my initial vision for the business was definitely, we'll scale it out. Things start to get a lot more cost effective if we have multiple locations.
So, the goal is to have — my husband and I were thinking three locations minimally.
[00:11:35] Sanjay Parekh: Yeah.
[00:11:36] Dominique Elkind: And we really bake out the concept and the procedures and figure out what works in terms of the space, in terms of the offerings, memberships, as well as like party packages and the drop-in play rates as well as the menu. And then we potentially franchise it or expand it out. That would be the ultimate goal.
[00:12:03] Sanjay Parekh: Okay, you're running this as a side hustle. But you just had your second kid. You're on maternity leave and doing a side hustle. Have you projected for, at some point, maternity leave ends and you got to go back to work?
I guess you don't have to go back to work. It depends on how all this takes off. But how are you going to manage, balancing these two things, work and a side hustle, if it comes to pass that you're having to do both?
[00:12:37] Dominique Elkind: So, pre-babies, I definitely was a workaholic.
I worked all the time. I don't know if I should be proud of that. I would work weekdays, and then I would go home and like work at night and on the weekends. It's definitely like having kids has made me like set a bit more boundaries of "Okay, I can't work 24 hours a day."
One thing that's nice about this business is that the peak hours are Friday, Saturday, Sunday, which is not when I would be working my normal job. And then the other thing about this venture is, one of the things that I'm planning on doing is, I didn't want to just make another job for myself.
So, I plan on having like employees eventually, that could be in the space when I'm not there.
[00:13:38] Sanjay Parekh: That's an interesting kind of point there, having employees. How are you thinking about setting the boundaries? Because honestly, the place that you're starting is kind of made for you, because you've got young kids and that could be a place you hang out.
But if you go hang out there, you're going to end up working. So how are you thinking about setting boundaries for yourself between work and life and the other work?
[00:14:05] Dominique Elkind: Yeah. Yeah. I think one thing that I heard when I was researching this concept in particular, is that a lot of owners or founders go in thinking that "Oh, this is a great venture because you can just bring your kids to work." And I went in thinking, I know that's not possible. So, my kids have, right now they're in daycare. But one of them will start school pretty soon, so I still I don't anticipate them coming with me.
There's definitely a boundary of, when I'm working, I’m working, and when I'm with them, it's our time to just be together. So that's definitely a boundary. Although I do think there is something nice about a business like this, where they can come, and they can be there and they're not disruptive.
It's okay for them to just be in the background doing something or they can help out a little bit. Maybe they clean and that's it.
[00:15:06] Sanjay Parekh: Right. I'm projecting forward, Dominique, that, 20 years from now, your kids are going to be like, "Yeah, mom, you had this great play space, but we never get to play in it. And you only made us work every time we went there. It wasn't fun for us." I'm not sure how that conversation is going to go, but you should start preparing for it now. Because, I have a feeling it's going to come.
[00:15:29] Dominique Elkind: Yeah, I totally agree. One of the other things that was something that I had this conversation with friends and my husband who's partnering with me in the business of just, do we really want to focus so specifically on this young group?
So, like the target age range is zero to five, which is pretty specific. And I felt like the answer was yes, because there really is nothing catered to this group of new parents. One of the things that we cater to for parties, it's you could have a baby shower.
But really focused on this group of age ranges of it's really young, but also new parents. Which doesn't seem to exist because a lot of the spaces focus on a little bit older. Because you get a bit more longevity, of the kids can maybe use the space for longer or-
[00:16:34] Sanjay Parekh: Yeah, that thought about baby showers is interesting because I think the only baby showers I've ever seen or experienced has been in somebody's house or a large event space, which is not really built for this. I'm sure there's probably baby shower venues out there that I don't know about, but I don't really, the fact that I don't know about them probably means that there's an opportunity in the marketplace there so that you'd probably found. So that's interesting.
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[00:17:25] Sanjay Parekh: Okay. Let's shift gears a little bit and talk about something that you're probably not getting much of, which is sleep. And thinking about wellness, especially having two young kids and now having a side hustle. How are you thinking about that? How are you taking care of yourself in all of this?
[00:17:42] Dominique Elkind: Yeah, it's definitely a challenge sleep wise. I think the old cliche about sleep when baby sleeps is true. But just trying to take naps, whenever I can. And then, for the past couple of years now, I haven't slept through the night, but it hasn't been too terrible.
And I think, everything is a phase. So, I'm just like letting myself go through this phase of "Okay, like the next couple of years will be a bit challenging because, my sleep schedule will be a bit chaotic.”
But we also go to bed really early. I think that's something that's different. Like I mentioned, before I had kids, my husband works in tech as well, and we were both very typical tech employees where we might work during the day and then come home and break and then go back online and work on either a side project or something at work from like midnight to 3am. You just go all night.
And I think that's one of the hardest things to shift away from for me. It's really difficult, even in my own, it's my business and theoretically I could work all day all night on it. But you know for the sake of like my own sanity as well as you know the relationship with my kids as well as my health.
I have to stop and like really relegate myself to just work one, when I have child care, and two, like during hours when I shouldn't be sleeping. So that's a shift.
[00:19:31] Sanjay Parekh: That's probably a good shift I'd imagine right there. I can't say that it's been a long time since I've worked until three in the morning.
Those days are, I don't know if I ever had those days. I crash at some point. I need my sleep. But, let me ask you about the fact that you're doing a physical space is different, for you, especially, because you worked in tech and digital and all this stuff. How did you get over that hump for yourself?
Were you nervous at all about doing this? And then the second part of that is, how did you think about pricing these things and figuring out like what price points people are willing to pay for this stuff?
[00:20:11] Dominique Elkind: Yeah, it was definitely, I would say it was a really big mental hurdle to get over, in terms of going from like a software product or idea to thinking about founding a physical space.
I did a lot of research. I mentioned that. And it's really hard. One of the things that I enjoyed about opening up a brick-and-mortar space was, I had felt like I had so much to learn and that's always been important to me in whatever I'm doing is I want keep learning. I want to keep growing.
And I also felt like, having recently worked on some AI products and just digital products. I was like, that's great. But, I feel like what's missing, I just really want a physical place to go to. And everyone that I talked to was like, "I also would enjoy a place to go to where there's a sense of community."
And so, I felt there was a gap in the market that I didn't quite feel like software could fix. I talked to a mom who had been using the Peanut app and she was like, "Yeah, there's this app and in theory it should be this place where you could go and meet other moms." But it's just not the same as, going to a place and just having some serendipitous meeting with someone.
I felt really aligned with what she was saying. I was like, “I totally agree.” There's just something nice about going to a space and having that be a place where you can go and your kids can run around and I'm trying to limit my kids screen time as well.
[00:21:59] Sanjay Parekh: Yeah, I had no idea that there were, my kids are older so I've not experienced any of this and they were pre-all of these apps. I didn't know there was an app for meeting other parents that you could discuss things on, but yeah, that does seem weird a little bit because it's just the parents talking right the kids aren't involved in at that point.
[00:22:22] Dominique Elkind: Yeah, there's apps and digital offerings, but yeah, how do you get your kids to have a play date while you're doing this thing?
[00:22:37] Sanjay Parekh: Exactly. That's what like the jumping places and all that type of stuff is for. But you can't go to the jumping place every single day. So it's interesting that this niche that you found here. Okay. So, you've been doing this now for a few months now, at this point. Although you've been thinking about it for a while. Is there anything already that you realize, “Oh, I should have done this differently? I've already learned some stuff and I've discovered I did this wrong and I should have done it this way instead."
[00:23:11] Dominique Elkind: I think one thing that I have learned doing this venture as well as other ventures, it's just to find product market fit as cheaply as possible before investing anything.
And that is, I think it's really difficult with any sort of like brick-and-mortar business. So, one of the things that I did was I launched a website before I had anything and got feedback but also made it available for people to sign up for pre-memberships. And I had some people, I had to turn it off because I was actually getting too many people buying and I was worried that I was going to have to refund them, or get into a situation, and people were asking, "Are you open yet?"
So, I thought that was a really good sign, in terms of both the location that I had found, and the unique offering of how we were like marketing this particular venture.
[00:24:24] Sanjay Parekh: So, you'd already found the space when you opened online. How is it that you found the space as well?
[00:24:35] Dominique Elkind: Yeah, you know that was something that was interesting, as someone who's never like open to brick-and-mortar space before.
[00:24:42] Sanjay Parekh: Yeah.
[00:24:43] Dominique Elkind: I spent a number of months like looking around at real estate and trying to figure out where a location might work. I had a number of locations where I was interested, but they weren't interested in me because they didn't want to take a chance on a startup.
And so, a number of places that I was like, "This place is perfect, this would be a perfect place." They were like, "We only want franchises." And this obviously is not that. Or I found one place that would have been like a really nice, a nice place. But they wanted someone a bit more established, who just had been operating before in another location.
So that was also interesting. It wasn't something that I necessarily would have thought would be a barrier, was just actually finding the space to lease.
[00:25:40] Sanjay Parekh: Yeah. But I hope you kept a list of all of those organizations that said no to you and at some point in the future you do like a Julia Roberts Pretty Woman thing to them. And be like "Remember when, yeah, no, I you don't get my stuff anymore.” When it's a big deal and they're asking you to come in instead of the other way around.
Did you keep a list? You got that list, right? Okay, good.
[00:26:05] Dominique Elkind: Yes, exactly.
[00:26:06] Sanjay Parekh: I'm not saying that you should be vindictive, but maybe you should be a little bit vindictive. For the people that are not like that. Just kidding. Okay. Last question for you. Well, maybe. Depends on what you say and if I come up with another question for you.
You've been thinking about this for a couple of years. And you've now finally taken the leap into this. If you were talking to somebody else that was thinking about taking the leap like you did and starting a side hustle, what kind of advice would you give them?
[00:26:38] Dominique Elkind: Yeah, I think the advice that I would give them is, if you're passionate about something and you really, and you know that you can make it work, it's just to try.
And try something, right? Like, you can jump in and maybe dip a toe. What can you do to, you know, find your product market fit and find your community of potential customers? Maybe without taking as big a risk, as little risk as you possibly can. Maybe you do pop ups, or maybe you start something digital, invest as cheaply as you possibly can to figure out first what works. And try out the space and see if you like it because you can always kind of pivot before you invest too much in it.
[00:27:30] Sanjay Parekh: Yeah. Do you think for you, this kind of endeavor has been so far successful because you were able to draw on your skills as a designer into the space. How much do you think that played actually into the, so far, progress that you've made?
[00:27:47] Dominique Elkind: Yeah okay, I would say a lot. Because one of the driving forces behind the business as well, of just not having enough of things like this, was also this realization that the competition in the market was very poorly designed. And I say that in terms of a multitude of things like the actual physical space not being designed very well. The branding, the colors, the materials, just the whole experience being just kind of ‘meh.’
And so really feeling like, my husband and I would take our son to these places. wherever we could because we're like, “Well, it's the only game in town." But you know really thinking, what if there was something different and what if there was something that was really beautifully designed?
And really thoughtfully designed, and really adhered to a more premium experience? You know thinking, would people pay for that? And then I just started testing it and I started like, I put out a survey, it was like, “Would you pay for this?” And people saying yes, or I did one survey where I had asked people, and to be fair, like my network's a bit, most of my networks is here in Seattle and in the bay area. So used to higher price point. But they were thinking even higher than what I had even imagined. So, I was like, okay, this could work.
[00:29:23] Sanjay Parekh: Yeah. Yeah. That is fantastic. Dominique, this has been great. Where can our listeners find and connect with you online?
[00:29:31] Dominique Elkind: Yeah. So, personally I'm on LinkedIn.
And then you can find me on my business website, which is just www.nixi.city. And then, the business is also on Facebook and Instagram.
[00:29:49] Sanjay Parekh: Awesome. Thanks so much for being on today.
[00:29:52] Dominique Elkind: Yeah, thank you so much. It was fun.
[00:29:59] Sanjay Parekh: Thanks for listening to this week's episode of the Side Hustle to Small Business podcast, powered by Hiscox. To learn more about how Hiscox can help protect your small business through intelligent insurance solutions, visit Hiscox.com. And to hear more Side Hustle to Small Business stories, or share your own story, please visit Hiscox.com/side-hustle-to-small-business. I'm your host, Sanjay Parekh. You can find out more about me at my website, SanjayParekh.com.
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