Lady talk with LadyPlans founder, Julie Berard

July 21, 2016

Julie and I met at RISE conference in HongKong last June. She reached out to me to take a look at her app called LadyPlans. I got very interested in it since I’m a busy lady who needs help in organising my time. Julie is a former consultant for management in technology. She has been... / READ MORE /

/ Babe /

Julie is a former consultant for management in technology. She has been working in this guild for almost 9 years and started LadyPlans as a side project when she was still working in London and the idea is to help yourself, your loved one and whoever is around you.

I was a very busy mom handling crazy schedules for myself and two young boys. I have been looking in my iphone app to manage some schedules to make my life easier and to optimise my time more. I couldn’t really find what I was looking for which is a woman-centric organiser and not an autonomy organiser because there are a ton of it in the app store. I was looking for something for me and the other parts of my life that could organise things for me. LadyPlans is an organiser dedicated to women and built by a woman which is differentiated as well.

With LadyPlan, you could access in the same app both your calendar and your checklist. Usually you mange them into 2 different apps and it’s difficult to reconcile them. You lose a lot of information in the end and you retype your calendar to make sure of your to-dos. That’s really time consuming and it’s not adding any value in your life in the way you manage your time. The idea is to have a lot of ready made list in the app so you can quickly add events that you do like preparation for birthdays and holidays like Christmas. These are the type of events that you organise every year. You can quickly plan them and schedule them in your calendar based on the data that you want to do. Basically, this is what Lady Plans does.

Julie got her inspiration from the skills that she got from her job as a consultant.

I was working as a business analyst for big companies. I was used to understand marketing, business needs and web based solutions. I really enjoyed doing this and I was willing to stay with it. But I was frustrated in working in just one part of the project. I want to build something from sratch and explore all the aspects of entrepreneurship at the end. I was looking at different ideas with my husband. I want to create something for ourselves. At some point, it’s the personal needs that led to the project. I was a working mom with children and a full time job. It was difficult to manage in terms of time. I knew what I needed. I was planning all the time. That’s how it began.

Julie and LadyPlans’ ultimate goal is to help women’s lives become easier through technology and women centric content. I think today we can leverage technology to help women’s life. Based on the fact that today, women are still the one that spends the most time for nonpaying time like family time and home time as part of their own job. This is especially in Europe and in US. Everywhere now, there are dedicated women and still there is this imbalance between men and women in terms of time. It’s really important to help woman manage their time more effectively.

I didn’t want to give up my job because I worked a lot to get this job. I’ve invested a lot of effort all this years,. It’s not because I have become a mother and I will give up everything. Myself has been built in the fact that I have worked hard. Sometime it’s so difficult to manage all of it. We really need the help of technology to make our life easier.

LadyPlans was launched February this year. Around March, Julie read an article about Melinda Gates. Every year she publishes a letter for the Gates foundation and this year it was focusing on gender equality. Maybe as women we want to balance our time between different things in our lives. Sometimes we want it or sometimes we have to do it. In the end we have two solutions, either we make ourselves more productive through technology or we try to change mentalities. Those two battles but they can be ran together at the same time.

Me, for myself, I’m small and the ambition is very big. It becomes real and complete through the app. It helps women manage time that is very scarce for busy women.

The main challenge now that the app is running well, have passed the Beta version and getting traction is to get it known by more people. There are a lot of app launched by big companies and are supported by big marketing budgets.