How Sheboygan County Helped Build Go With Rosie

Go With Rosie launched on March 18, 2026, but the work started long before that. The Sheboygan County Economic Development Corporation (SCEDC), Accelerate Sheboygan County, and the Sheboygan County Innovation Council played a direct role in helping us get from an idea scribbled on a whiteboard to a live product that families across the country are using right now. This post is a thank-you, and a look at what that support actually looked like.

What Are SCEDC and Accelerate Sheboygan County?

If you're not from Sheboygan County, you probably haven't heard of these organizations. That's a shame, because they're doing something remarkable.

The Sheboygan County Economic Development Corporation (SCEDC) is the county's economic development arm, working alongside the Small Business Development Center (SBDC) at UW-Green Bay to support businesses and entrepreneurs across the region.

Accelerate Sheboygan County is their county-wide entrepreneurship initiative, powered by the Sheboygan County Innovation Council and the SCEDC. It connects founders with mentorship, pitch competitions, capital resources, and the kind of honest community support that's hard to find. Built for a county that believes startups don't have to be in San Francisco or Austin to matter.

How They Helped Go With Rosie

When Go With Rosie was still a concept and a pitch deck, the Innovation Council was one of the first groups to take it seriously. Through Accelerate Sheboygan County's pitch competitions, mentorship, and programming, the Innovation Council helped us refine the concept from something that sounded good in a living room conversation into a real business plan with real numbers behind it.

The support went beyond advice. Go With Rosie received an Accelerate Sheboygan County Technical Assistance Grant and a Product Development Loan, both of which helped move the business from idea to launch. We competed in numerous pitch competitions along the way, including the Startup World Cup Regional hosted by the SCEDC, where we took home the People's Choice Award. That kind of validation from your own community hits different.

There's a difference between organizations that hand you a brochure and organizations that sit across the table, tell you what's not working, and then help you fix it. The SCEDC and Innovation Council did the second thing.

What the Innovation Council Had to Say

Justin Vannieuwenhoven, Chair of the Sheboygan County Innovation Council, put it this way:

That last part matters. Go With Rosie is a family trip planner for the entire country, built in a Wisconsin county with about 116,000 people. The fact that something like this can come out of Sheboygan County is proof that the right support systems make the difference, not the zip code.

Wisconsin Press Coverage

Since our launch, a number of Wisconsin news outlets have covered the story of Go With Rosie and its Sheboygan County roots. We're grateful to each of them for helping share what's happening here.

WHBL covered our launch and noted our People's Choice Award win at the Startup World Cup Regional. Seehafer News wrote about how the SCEDC supported the concept from its early stages. Insight on Business published a feature that detailed both the product and the local entrepreneurship support that helped bring it to life. And WisBusiness ran the full press release authored by Ray York, Business Counselor for the SCEDC and the SBDC at UW-Green Bay.

That coverage, combined with our earlier feature in PhocusWire (one of the leading travel industry publications in the country), means Go With Rosie's story is reaching both local communities and the national travel industry. Not bad for a team that's roughly 80% Wisconsin-based.

What We're Actually Building

The support from the SCEDC and Accelerate helped us launch, but it's worth talking about what they helped us launch.

Go With Rosie is a family trip planner built on a simple idea: recommendations from families, for families. Every score, every review, every suggestion comes from real parents and caregivers who have actually been there with kids in tow. Here's how the Rosie Score works.

Here's what makes that different. The big online travel agencies (Hotels.com, Expedia, and the rest) measure success by bookings. Their entire model is built around getting you to the checkout page. Go With Rosie measures success by discovery and planning. Did you find the right destination for your family? Did you build an itinerary that actually works with nap schedules and short attention spans? Did you know which pool has a gradual entry for toddlers before you booked?

That's where the value starts. And when it's time to book, Go With Rosie will handle that too. We're putting the final pieces in place for hotel booking right now, and the rates will be equivalent to what you'd find on any other major site. The difference is everything that happens before you book and after you arrive.

When those three things work together, they create a cycle. Families discover great places, plan trips that actually fit their kids, book with confidence, and then share what they learned for the next family. That's what the SCEDC, Accelerate, and the Innovation Council helped make possible.

Remote Work Changed Where Companies Can Be Built

There was a time when building a tech company meant relocating to Silicon Valley or New York. That's not true anymore. Remote work has opened up opportunity in places that used to get overlooked, and Sheboygan County is one of them. Go With Rosie has a team that's roughly 80% Wisconsin-based, working on a product used by families across the entire country.

According to the US Census Bureau, there are 33 million households with children in the United States. That's who we're building for. And with remote-first teams, the right support locally, and organizations like the SCEDC and Accelerate backing founders where they already live, the old playbook of "move to a coast or don't bother" doesn't hold up anymore.

Try It Out

Go With Rosie is free. You can explore destinations, build itineraries, and check family-friendliness scores for venues right now. Hotel booking is coming very soon. No subscriptions, no paid placements, no data selling.

And if you've already visited somewhere great (or somewhere terrible) with your kids, share your experience. Every family's input makes the recommendations better for the next family looking for the same thing.

To the SCEDC, the Innovation Council, Ray York, Justin Vannieuwenhoven, and everyone at Accelerate who gave us honest feedback before anyone outside the county knew our name: we won't forget it. Now let's go help some families plan better trips.

Questions about Go With Rosie and our Sheboygan County roots

Last updated: April 15, 2026