Yuen: Can a Minneapolis startup solve the summer camp registration nightmare?

Every arctic-chilled January in Minnesota, Meredith Englund becomes a town crier for overtaxed parents, warning them of impending doom if they don't figure out their summer child care plans soon.

"My favorite conversations are with people who have a 5-year-old, and I'm like, 'Oh my goodness, you need to be looking now,' " she said. "When friends ask you in March, 'Where do you think you'll be sending your kids for summer camp?' it's like, 'Oh, honey.'"

That's because by March, many of those programs, ranging from cardboard-building adventures to traditional fishing camps, have long been booked. Summer camp registration is one the most frustrating, anxiety-inducing administrative chores of modern parenting. But this is how the system works. And for working parents who need child care when school's out, we must play the game.

That means immediately after the holidays, we research online signup dates and set up calendar reminders. Coordinate with our kids' friends and their parents through shareable spreadsheets and group texts. Search the nooks and crannies of the internet for pickup and dropoff times. The puzzle gets even more complex when you have multiple children.

Englund, the mom of an 8- and 5-year-old, agrees: It's bananas.

And yet camp registration "isn't rocket science," said Englund, who spent a decade working at Ecolab before diving into the tech startup space. "I was coming from a company where we were driving robots doing food delivery in Spain using VR. You can't tell me we can't solve this problem."

Along with co-founders Erin Anderson and Vasilis "Tzikis" Georgitzikis, last year Englund formed a Minneapolis startup called Camperoni. It provides a free website where parents can search for kids' camps and activities based on a number of criteria — such as location, interests, price, schedules and availability of financial aid — and share their selections with friends.

Englund says Camperoni is committed to reducing the administrative gruntwork of parenting. By her analysis of U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics figures, families with school-age children are spending up to 12 hours a week on kid-related administrative activities, everything from answering school emails to scheduling carpools.

Online registration for kids' activities hasn't kept pace with innovations seen in other industries. Look at how Uber and DoorDash, for example, have revolutionized our day-to-day lives.

"This is completely solvable by technology," said Englund. "AI makes it so you can discover and manage camp data a lot easier than in the past."

Despite having launched the site in its current form just a couple of months ago, Camperoni has about 3,400 registered users, most of them arriving at the site by word of mouth. The database includes 240 camp providers in Minnesota and Wisconsin, with more than 1,800 individual camps listed for this summer, other school breaks and holidays.

The interface is simple and intuitive. When I recently tested it, it steered me to an assortment of camps, both familiar and obscure. One irritation is you cannot yet filter by distance to your home, but Englund promises that feature is coming soon.

I would be remiss if I failed to mention that my own employer, the Star Tribune, offers an annual comprehensive online summer camp guide. Ours will roll out in February. Like Camperoni, it's free for camps to list.

But Englund says Camperoni's broader mission goes well beyond summer camps. In November, it was one of several startups picked up by the Minnesota Twins Accelerator by Techstars, which has provided the company with mentorship, training and funding. Anderson is a digital marketing director at the windows maker Andersen Corp.; Georgitzikis is a computer engineer.

"Our vision is to be the digital personal assistant for parents," Englund said. "We're run by two moms and a fun uncle. We are well aware of and have lived the challenge of this space for years now. We're on it."

One thing Camperoni can't do is sign up your kid for camp. Parents still need to handle that, and this year I've noticed a few providers tweaking their registration methods.

After the YMCA of the North was overloaded by signups on a single day last year, causing massive slowdowns, it promised to consider a number of changes. It ultimately decided to prioritize families with Y memberships, giving them first dibs on signups earlier this month and opening it to all families this week. The changes also spread out the registration dates by camp location, hopefully easing demand and avoiding another fiasco.

Frustrations with summer camp signups are arguably a first-world problem, and it's perhaps rich to hear me — a college-educated, partnered parent in a relatively flexible, white-collar job — kvetch about this perennial burden. But I'll remind you that summer camp is a form of child care, an industry beset with a supply-and-demand imbalance and staffing issues that worsened during the pandemic. The status quo shouldn't be acceptable, especially for parents with fewer privileges.

"People ask about the equity piece and say, 'Is this site just for rich white women?" Englund says. "The answer is, the current system is not doing a great job with equity."

The system is rigged toward parents who can step out of their jobs, sometimes up for three hours in the workday, to compete for camp spots as if they were tickets to see Taylor Swift. The more transparency that tech entrepreneurs can add to the market, the better the outcome for all working parents. As Englund notes, it's a problem when we're all fighting over the same camps.

Let's hope that a couple of moms and a cool uncle, and other innovators like them, can figure out a better way.

Until then, many of us will be setting our alarm clocks for the next camp signup.

May the odds be ever in our favor.