Latest / The Comeback Career Podcast with Fexingo: Returning After a Gap, Stay-at-Home Re-Entry / How a Career Gap Helped One Parent Build a Financial Literacy App
Transcript
- Lucas: Sarah Chen spent five years at home with twins. When she decided to return to work, she didn't update her resume and start applying. She built a financial literacy app that's now in over 200 high schools. Luna: Wait — she taught herself to code while raising two toddlers? Lucas: She did. And that's what I want to dig into today. Because a lot of people hear 'career gap' and immediately think liability. But Sarah treated her gap like a research sabbatical. She didn't just watch the twins — she watched how her own money habits changed with one income, and she got curious about why financial literacy isn't taught earlier. Luna: So the seed of the business came from her lived experience during the gap itself. Lucas: Exactly. She told me that when she and her husband dropped to one salary, she realized she had never really understood budgeting beyond 'spend less than you earn.' She started reading personal finance blogs, then academic papers on financial literacy. And she thought, there's got to be a better way to teach this to kids before they make expensive mistakes. Luna: And that's when she decided to build it herself? Lucas: Not right away. She spent about a year just learning. She took free online courses — Codecademy, freeCodeCamp, MIT OpenCourseWare. She'd put the twins down for a nap and code for an hour. When they started preschool, she had three hours in the morning, and she treated it like a job. Lucas: By the end of year two, she had a prototype. An ugly one — she called it 'Frankenstein's app' — but it worked. She tested it with five friends who were also new parents. Luna: What did she do for market research? I mean, she wasn't exactly running focus groups between diaper changes. Lucas: She actually did run focus groups. At her local library. She posted on the community board and offered a free one-hour workshop on 'budgeting for new parents.' Fifteen people showed up. She used that session to ask what they wished they'd learned about money in high school. Luna: That's smart. Low-cost validation, and she got direct feedback from her target audience's parents. Lucas: After a year of iterating on that feedback, she had a version she was ready to pitch to schools. But here's where it gets interesting. She had zero sales experience, zero edtech experience. Her background was marketing at a midsize consumer goods company — before the twins. Lucas: And if listeners find this kind of practical career-break strategy useful, I'll mention that this show stays ad-free because of listener support at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. No pressure — just if you've gotten value from episodes like this. Luna: Yeah, it really helps keep the conversations focused on what actually works, not on sponsor reads. And Sarah's story is a great example of that. Lucas: So how did she break into school districts? She cold-emailed 50 high school principals with a simple offer: 'Let me run a free pilot for one semester.' Eight said yes. She drove to each school, set up the app on the computer lab, and taught the first lesson herself. Luna: That is not a marketing manager's typical skill set. Standing in front of teenagers, teaching personal finance. Lucas: She said the hardest part was not the coding or the teaching — it was the confidence. She told me, 'I had to remind myself that I had already run a household on one income for three years. If I could manage that, I could manage a classroom.' Luna: There's something there about the mindset shift. A career gap can feel like a blank spot on paper, but it's often where you develop the most resilience. Lucas: Right. And Sarah's story underscores that. After the pilot, two of the eight schools bought a license. Then word spread. She hired a part-time salesperson — a former teacher who understood the school buying cycle. By the end of year four, she had 50 schools. Now, in year six, she's at 200-plus. Luna: Did she ever go back to a traditional job application? Lucas: No. She said she considered it around year two, when the app wasn't growing fast enough and she was running low on savings. She even updated her resume. But she realized she didn't want to work for someone else again. She wanted to see this through. Luna: What would she say to someone who's on a career gap right now and feeling like they're falling behind? Lucas: She told me, 'Don't waste the gap worrying about the gap. Use the time to build something — a skill, a project, a network. The resume will fix itself.' Luna: That's a good line. And I think it's true. The people I've seen successfully re-enter after a long break — they didn't just wait. They did something intentional. Lucas: Exactly. Sarah didn't sit at home polishing her LinkedIn. She built a product. And now she's in a position where she doesn't have to explain the gap at all — because the gap produced the business. Luna: I love that. It flips the narrative completely. Lucas: One more thing she mentioned: she made a point to stay visible during the gap. She wrote a blog about her budgeting experiments. She joined a local entrepreneurship meetup. She kept her LinkedIn active with updates about her learning journey — not 'looking for work' but 'building something new.' That kept the door open for mentors and early customers. Luna: So she was essentially networking without calling it networking. Just sharing what she was learning. Lucas: Right. And that's a strategy anyone can use. You don't have to build an app. Maybe you volunteer for a nonprofit's finance committee, or you take a certification course and write about it. The point is to stay in motion. Luna: What's next for FinLit? Is she still running it solo? Lucas: She has three part-time contractors now — a developer, a curriculum writer, and the salesperson I mentioned. She's also working on a parent-facing version, because she found that a lot of adults want to improve their own financial literacy alongside their kids. Luna: That makes sense. The gap that started it all — her own financial wake-up call — is still driving the product. Lucas: Exactly. So the takeaway for me is: if you're on a career gap, treat it as R&D. You have time and mental space that you won't have once you're back in the workforce. Use it to explore something you're genuinely curious about. Worst case, you learn something. Best case, you build your next career. Luna: Worst case you learn something — I think that's a pretty good worst case. Lucas: Agreed. Sarah's story is proof that a gap doesn't have to be a pause. It can be a launch.