After almost three years of quietly putting down roots, an online platform that aims to help individuals organize their thoughts and embrace personal growth is beginning to branch out.
This fall, Maple, which has been operating under the radar during an extensive buildout, is rolling out a new version called Maple Pro and starting to aggressively take its product into the public sphere.
“I feel like we’re right on the precipice,” co-founder Christine Dawson said.
Founded by Dawson and software developer Scott Waletzko, Maple brings together a variety of tools to help people identify, work toward and reflect on their personal and professional goals, all through one handy dashboard.
The genesis of the idea came from the pair’s experience in management consulting, where they saw clients use a range of instruments, from journals and self-help workbooks to Evernote, trackers and online learning programs. But while each piece of the puzzle brought its own rewards it was easy for clients to forget observations or notes they had made on one platform while working in another.
“The thing Maple is unique with is it does all those things,” Waletzko said.
Out of an original idea scrawled on a whiteboard, Maple has grown since its early days in late 2015: “Eighty percent of what it does now is what I said no to in the beginning,” Waletzko said.
On the dashboard, users can collect thoughts and scraps of insight in one place. Categories and tags can be assigned to items, reminders can be sent urging users to return to a note or task, and feedback can be solicited from a trusted “Thought Partner” the user has identified.
Adopting a freemium model similar to WordPress, users can get access to the platform’s basic functionalities for free and then, as they extend usage, can pay small fees that Dawson said are calculated to be “below the cost of a Hulu subscription” to expand those functionalities.
“We wanted it to be a la carte because everyone’s going to be using it differently,” Waletzko said.
Maple Pro, which the startup plans to launch this fall, is designed for use by personal coaches, leadership experts, mentors, therapists or anyone else in a guidance role and will allow professionals to track their clients’ progress. The client will control how much of their dashboard the professional has access to.
That choice was deliberate: The tool is “supposed to be individual and introspective,” Waletzko said. “We’re not trying to be the next social media platform.”
Privacy is so critical to Maple that users cannot even search for people they know who might also use the platform. Those who wish to solicit feedback from a “Thought Partner” can send a code to the targeted individual that will allow the pair to connect on a specific question or reflection.
Dawson and Waletzko have been bootstrapping the development of Maple, shifting out of management consulting into a full-time focus on the startup in September 2017. A beta version of the platform launched early this year and was refined to become the product that is now publicly available.
Today, Maple boasts about 1,000 users, with a core group of about 10 percent who Dawson and Waletzko say are consistently in the dashboard.
As Maple Pro inches closer to launch, the pair is also looking to bring their startup out of its development stage and into a phase of more active growth. This August, they became one of the newest members of Startup Virginia, taking up space in the 1717 Innovation Center and making more contacts in the city’s startup community – a sphere to which it may be uniquely suited, given the dynamism of entrepreneurs.
After all, Waletzko said, Maple is “a space for everything in your mind … It’s not about what you can do with Maple, it’s what you can get out of it."
