moms, meet!

Clever app that's like Tinder for moms swipes into Houston

The innovative app for mother's launches in Houston on July 30.

Courtesy photo

Whether it’s nurturing newborns or tutoring teens, motherhood is no easy task. What can be even harder is finding mom friends or women who can relate.

“You may be the first out of your girlfriends to have a baby, or your friends and family who are already mothers may live far away,” Michelle Kennedy, a tech expert and busy mom, tells CultureMap. “Leaving the house to go anywhere further than 10 minutes from home with a newborn can feel like a military operation.”

Kennedy, once a board adviser at Bumble, realized that it was difficult for mothers to admit that they were feeling lonely. Worse still, the results of randomly meeting other moms or being set up could sometimes be awkward and disappointing.

“A bit like dating, moms can experience a lot of, ‘I have to introduce you to my friend, she's a new mommy too,’” says Kennedy, “only to go through an awkward 'date' — where you realize the only thing you have in common is that you both have a child.”

The dating analogy is apropos, as Kennedy headached a solution: Peanut, an app that makes it easy for like-minded moms to meet, chat, and learn from one another. The app/service launched in 2017 and has garnered a membership of more than 1 million mothers. It’s currently available across the U.S., Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom. Peanut is free to download from the App Store and Google Play.

Good news for local moms: After first launching in Austin, Peanut is arriving in Houston on Tuesday, July 30. “We noticed that a lot of women were actively using Peanut in Houston, despite us doing no official marketing there,” Kennedy says. “This shows there is a need for women in the area to meet other mamas. We hope this will encourage more mothers (and mothers-to-be) in Houston to join the app and connect with like-minded women.”

Users will find that Peanut’s Discovery feature operates similarly to a dating app. Simply fill out a profile, including information such as neighborhood, bio, photos, age/gender of children or due date, interests, and other defining factors, such as work life and education. The app uses intelligent algorithms and geo-location to match mothers with like-minded women nearby. Once matched, users can chat and create meetups.

An interesting item is the “Packs” initial feature. “When you join Peanut, we ask users to select three 'Packs' to describe themselves,” says Kennedy. “This helps us match women with common interests. Looking at Houston, the Top 3 most popular Packs are: ‘But First Food,’ ‘Wine Time,’ and ‘Sleep Deprived.’”

Sounds like three perfect reasons for moms to meet up and commiserate.

2026 jobs forecast

Houston's health care sector will drive job growth in 2026, report predicts

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Buoyed by the growing health care sector, the Houston metro area will add 30,900 jobs in 2026, according to a new forecast from the Greater Houston Partnership.

The report predicts the Houston area’s health care sector will tack on 14,000 jobs next year, which would make it the No. 1 industry for local job growth. The 14,000 health care jobs would represent 45 percent of the projected 30,900 new jobs. In the job-creation column, the health care industry is followed by:

Construction: addition of 6,100 jobs in 2026
Public education: Addition of 5,800 jobs
Public administration: Addition of 5,000 jobs

At the opposite end of the regional workforce, the administrative support services sector is expected to lose 7,500 jobs in 2026, preceded by:

Manufacturing: Loss of 3,400 jobs
Oil-and-gas extraction: Loss of 3,200 jobs
Retail: Loss of 1,800 jobs

“While current employment growth has moderated, the outlook remains robust and Houston’s broader economic foundation remains strong,” GHP president and CEO Steve Kean said in the report.

“Global companies are choosing to invest in Houston — Eli Lilly, Foxconn, Inventec, and others — because they believe in our workforce and our long-term trajectory,” Kean added. “These commitments reinforce that Houston is a place where companies can scale and where our economy continues to demonstrate its resilience as a major engine for growth and opportunity. These commitments and current prospects we are working on give us confidence in the future growth of our economy.”

The Greater Houston Partnership says that while the 30,900-job forecast falls short of the region’s recent average of roughly 50,000 new jobs per year, it’s “broadly in line with the muted national outlook” for employment gains anticipated in 2026.

“Even so, Houston’s young, skilled workforce and strong pipeline of major new projects should help offset energy sector pressures and keep regional growth on pace with the nation,” the report adds.

The report says that even though the health care sector faces rising insurance costs, which might cause some people to delay or skip medical appointments, and federal changes in Medicare and Medicaid, strong demographic trends in the region will ensure health care remains “a key pillar of Houston’s economy.”

As for the local oil-and-gas extraction industry, the report says fluctuations and uncertainty in the global oil-and-gas market will weigh on the Houston sector in 2026. Furthermore, oil-and-gas layoffs partly “reflect a longer-term trend as companies in the sector move toward greater efficiency using fewer workers to produce similar volumes,” according to the report.

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This story originally was published on our sister site, InnovationMap.