Our mission
We are out to make a free nationwide legal resource platform for family law. Parents will be able to get state by state, county by county legal information, connections to non-profits and ratings for local attorneys. It will also provide step by step instructions on how to fill out the paperwork needed to respond or file for anything related to family law. Along with all these other valuable resources our platform will provide smart petitioning that will help all of these great organizations trying to make positive change to family law get more traction and achieve a higher level of success. The time for a dynamic nationwide family law help resource is now!!! Thank you so much for supporting our mission to make this a reality.
How this came to be
Hi I'm Brandon Lyons, a 29-year-old single father to a beautiful 5-year-old daughter. I have worked really hard to be an active part of my daughter's life. Two years ago, in late 2011 I found myself in a situation where my daughter's mother was trying to take away the quality time my daughter and I were used to having together. The prospect of losing this quality time was horrifying. I was working as a low-wage construction worker, had my daughter the majority of the time while still paying child support, but I was so happy to have her full time that I didn't want to open up that can of worms with her mother. I was optimistic enough to think that one day things would change naturally for the better.
When my daughter's mother was finished with school she came to me and told me that my time with my daughter was going to be reduced to every other weekend and she wanted more child support. I wasn't keeping a record of how often I had my daughter because I never expected to face this; and when the child support case came I never thought they would increase my payment from $375 to $785 based purely on the fact that her mother said that she was going to file a new parenting plan that gave me every other weekend. When the child support case results came I was shocked. It took 4 weeks to hear the court decision and during that time frame I still had my daughter the majority of the time. Something had to be done but with no cash or credit resources to afford a lawyer my options were looking slim and scary. I set up meetings with lawyers but without money that was a no-go and then I contacted a firm that would fill out the paperwork needed for court, only to find out that they still cost in excess of $2000 just for the paperwork.
Although I was extremely let down by these two paths they did both offer me one solid piece of advice as well as one harsh truth. The advice was to keep track of how often I had my daughter and the expenses that I incurred on a monthly basis as well as try my very best to backtrack my prior time spent. That was something other parents advised me to do as well. The harsh truth is that because I wasn’t the custodial parent it was going to be an extremely hard case to win. I immediately starting implementing their advice; looking back to figure out the precise times I had her in the past proved beyond difficult, but not impossible. I also started to research the outcomes of cases similar to mine and it didn’t comfort me one bit. In fact it made me sick to find out how many great mothers and fathers had been run over and there was a direct cause: flawed laws and parents that abused the system for their own personal gain. It got me so fired up that I decided to make an organization aimed at protecting the great mothers and fathers that deserve to be partners in the raising of their children.
I hit the books, started networking, met with law makers, and did the only thing that my finances could support--filling out the paperwork and representing myself in court. This wasn’t easy and I wanted to give up many times, but my daughter always motivated me to keep going. Here I was working full time, being a full-time father, working on getting my organization going and getting ready to represent myself in court. The paperwork alone was a huge task. It involved over one hundred pages and took me filling out the wrong paperwork in its entirety four times to get it right. Talk about frustration but I did end up getting it right. I was so busy that I was lucky to get 3-4 hours of sleep a night.
While I was doing all this it was incredibly difficult to keep track of how often I had my daughter on a daily basis. I often found myself trying to think back to what exactly the schedule had been for the previous two weeks. This pattern continued for about another month until I thought “there has to be an app for this,” and so the search began. After a couple weeks of searching I was extremely disappointed that I had not yet found what I was looking for. As I was sitting down trying to remember my schedule for the last week it hit me, why doesn’t the app I had dreamt about exist? An app that not only conveniently helps parents keep track of scheduling and expenses but would also help parents get the free resources they would ordinarily have to spend days or weeks on Google trying to find, an app that can help them contact helpful non-profits in their area, an app that would help to increase the unity and the cooperation from organization to organization. From that moment I saw the vision of what an app like this can do for the movement and I set forth making my vision a reality.
I didn’t have the resources to put this all together so I made a business plan and started approaching the banks. I remember the first time I e-mailed my 20 page business plan and the spelling and grammar was so bad that the response email literally contained laughter “hahahahaha have you prof read this” followed by everything incorrect being highlighted in red which was 90% of everything. This didn’t discourage me at all. Instead I corrected everything and turned that business plan from 20 to about 40 pages, turned it back and got a response back that it needed more specifics and information. I continued this back and forth routine and face to face meetings 40-50 more times with banks until I was left with a 200 plus page business plan and the recognition that banks would never loan me the money to a 500 credit score, $1,200/month income father like myself so I took the business plan that I had perfected and went in search of private investment. That path seemed impossible because none of my friends and family had the resources. If they did I likely would have been able to hire a lawyer for court, so needless to say those resources didn’t exist within my friends and family aside from the $300 dollars that I was really fortunate to receive from my grandma and the room and board my parents provided me.
Because my daughter and other people were counting on me, failure was not an option. Over the next few months I contacted over 150 people via phone and email, and met with over 40 people in person to give my pitch and each sharpened my ability and resolve to get this done, until one day I finally heard the yes I longed for! I was able to get enough funds to build the basic app for Android and it has been an amazing, lesson-learning ride. After over 6 months of development our first app, Dadmom is about to launch. This app is going to be a powerful tool for parents to keep record of scheduling and expenses. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to add the other side of equally valuable features that I also still hoped to make a completely separate free application to make sure everyone can use these resources. That’s why I’m here, to bring the entirety of this vision to fruition.
I am striving to bring a vision of fairness, transparency, accountability and accuracy to the family law system. A vision of parents being able to easily find the resources they desperately need, a vision of no good parent having to give all their quality family time, sleep, dreams, and money (borrowed or otherwise) just to get what is right out of family law. I’ve come too far to turn back, and I’m laser focused on making this a reality. It’s time we make a positive change for families by changing the way family law is practiced. Thanks so much for checking out my cause, I’m so grateful for everything we get for this cause, especially your support!
What We Need & What You Get
I am hoping to raise $30,000 to go entirely towards enhanced software development. I currently have the base software functionality developed for the android platform; any money raised beyond our goal will go towards expanding availability to other platforms such as Apple and Windows. If we do not reach our goal then we will use the capital raised to complete the task in the following order.
Where the funds are going
- Dynamic unifying organization to organization connecting
- Specific state by state information
- Organized petitioning
- More crisp and modern design
- Parent to parent resources and media sharing
- A second and completely free app that provides parents valuable resources
- Lay out the ground works for court integration
Enhanced security
The Impact
By contributing to this cause you are helping to take this great nation one big leap towards adding fairness through transparency, accuracy, and accountability. We've never had the ability to have a dynamic system that makes it extremely convenient for parents to keep custody and expense information until now. It’s time the family law system utilizes it to make a far better system that protects the many great parents that are negatively affected by the way the system is currently set up. The family law revolution starts here!
Not only will users be able to easily find local legal resources, non-profits and other organizations by simply using the Dadmom app, they will also be able to use the convenience of today's technology to help parents keep track of their child's expenses and how often they have them for legal, budgeting and/or other purposes. By using DadMom software, parents will be able to take date, time and location encrypted pictures, videos and receipt barcode by simply opening the DadMom app from their smart phone, tablet or computer and following a couple quick and easy steps. Users are able to set custom alarms and reminders to make a quick record of having their child or store their expense information. DadMom organizes the information into an easy-to-read and understandable legal format that can be exported to present to the court. The Dadmom app provides automatic uploading to a secure online database to ensure the information is accessible and safe. It will have many more features such as activity ideas, forums, classified ads, blogs, surveys, contests, prizes, important child medical information, interactive connections to social media, online parenting classes along with custom call and text recording.
Other Ways You Can Help
All the work I do stems from the passion I have for helping people. Over the last couple years I have dedicated all my free time to the parental equality movement. I’m passionate about helping the great parents that deserve to be an equal part in the raising of their child’s life, most do not have the financial resources to protect themselves in the family court. I run an organization were many of us don’t have the financial resources to sponsor this project but they provide something far more valuable, support, spreading the word and feedback in making sure the changes we seek are ones that will entire benefit of most import members of our society, our children! If you don’t have money don’t worry because your support in far more valuable, please help get the word out and connect with we on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/bfffr and twitter https://twitter.com/DadMomEquality. Get to know me, watch my video’s and feel my heart and if you support what I’m about then please like/follow me and tell you friends about this project. I owe everything to the men and women that have shown their belief in me, from the bottom of my heart thank you!
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