Founder profile
Building Hey Nellie with Byteforce behind the product.
Shonleigh Draper has spent the last ten years building businesses from the ground up. Five businesses, across recruitment, online training, personal branding and hospitality. She's hired people, trained people, fed people, and somewhere in the thick of all of it she's raising two little boys who keep her wonderfully and relentlessly busy. At 36, she's a wife, a mum, and now she's making her first move into the tech world with Hey Nellie. Of everything she's built, this is the one that means the most.
For years, Shonleigh carried the invisible weight of managing a household and a family, the way so many do without ever being asked to. The appointments. The permission slips. The who-needs-what-and-when. The mental tabs that never quite close. But nothing has ever kept her busier and more on her toes than the relentless pile-up of school apps, clashing schedules, and the small daily miracle of someone still making it to pick-up on time.
Running a family means holding a hundred small things at once, with most of them being invisible until they're forgotten. For years that holding was hers alone, tracked in her head and nowhere else, and she knew it only took one missed thing to make life a little harder for the people she loved the most. That is where Hey Nellie began, in her study, late one night after she thought "There's gotta be a better way than this".
Hey Nellie is an AI family management app built to help busy households plan, organise, share and manage everyday life with less admin. Nellie turns family chaos into calm.
Shonleigh has spent a decade backing her own ideas and learning most of it the hard way, building businesses on nothing more than an idea and, in her words, "a lot of blind trust and naivety."
Her mission for Hey Nellie is big, and she's not shy about it. Shonleigh wants Hey Nellie to positively impact the lives of one million families around the world. A million homes where the load is lighter, where it's finally shared and where the person who's been quietly carrying it all gets to put some of it down for good.