Name of the company: Tinystep Launch date: September 2015 Founding team: Suhail Abidi Location: Bangalore Funding raised in 2017: $2 million Overall funding raised since starting up: $2 million Jobs added since starting up/Strength of the company: 40 Industry it operates in: Parenting & child care
As the saying goes, a baby does not come with a manual, but with lots of questions. Recognising and acknowledging the challenges faced by new parents, a Bangalore-based startup has created an online platform that doubles up as a social networking site designed exclusively for them.
Driven by paediatric experts as well as other parents, it hosts discussions that provide reliable information and helpful tips on baby-care.
"The transition from joint family setups to a more nuclear one left a huge gap in the support infrastructure," says co-founder of Tinystep, Suhail Abidi. "Unavailability of trusted services and high quality content around infant care further exacerbated the problem," he adds.
After receiving his MBA from Standford University, Abidi returned to India to work on a solution, thus giving life to Tinystep.
"Tinystep is a parenting social network that provides a great platform for new parents to engage with others who are on a similar journey," he says. "By connecting them with doctors, child service providers and other parents globally, it provides them a free and comprehensive platform to ask, share and build a robust support system," he adds.
Launched in September 2015, its 40 plus team has collectively built features that are increasingly driving user adoption, including group chat options and active QnA columns. Its exhaustive editorial posts also cover a wide range of related subjects including speech development in babies, postpartum anxiety among mothers, depression in children and feminine hygiene.
"To ensure the quality of our content, we have partnered with doctors and other healthcare professionals," says Abidi. "We also work with a lot of engineers who take care of other aspects of the business, including feedback, operations and marketing," he adds.
Baby steps The startup claims to have five million monthly active users across its website and app. According to its founder, users spend more than an hour every day on the platform.
"Tinystep has covered over 200 topics in its blogs and answered close to 1,00,000 queries on child-care," says Abidi. "Our app also sees active participation from over 2,50,000 mothers. In fact, we have dedicated a section exclusively for women who want to ask questions that may be deemed highly private by them," he adds.
The platform currently has content spanning seven languages, namely English, Hindi, Bengali, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu and Marathi. It also launched its iOS app recently.
Little surprise, then, when it won the attention of one of the country's largest online retailer, Flipkart.
It successfully raised $2 million from the e-commerce giant early this year, which admittedly recognizes baby care as an important category on its platform. Although Tinystep is non-committal about entering the e-commerce space at this stage, the startup is focussed on improving its user experience and expanding other services on its platform.
Growing up In addition to being a one-stop location for new parents looking for guidance on childbearing and rearing, it also offers paid services like photography, parties as well as fitness classes. It also provides tools that require greater engagement from its user community, including baby photo contests, online vaccination charts, pregnancy calendars and suggestions for baby names.
"Be it learning the best ways to potty-train or seek out home remedies for colicky babies or simply finding a nanny, Tinystep has become the go-to platform for young parents as they navigate through this exciting journey," says Abidi. "Nobody prepares you for this job, but having a support system helps you make less mistakes and become better care-givers," he adds.
In fact, the team had their own mistakes to learn from before experiencing success.
"When we started off, nobody in the team was a parent so we had a hard time understanding our target users," says Abidi. "We now have people who have had real time experience in this field, so things are more sorted now," he adds.
According to him, the challenges that the startup faces today are of a different nature. "Although we have a far better understanding of our users today, creating content for them based on their personalized experiences is no mean feat," he adds.
Planning for the future Even as its brand name conveys the exact opposite, the startup is poised to take massive strides within the multi-billion dollar mother and baby care market.
"Our target audience makes up over 100 million of the population, most of whom will be online in the time to come," says Abidi. "Once we hit 20 million monthly active users in India, we might expand to international markets too," he adds.
It also plans to monetise at a local level and list more services anchored around parenting on its platform, such as day care centres. As it stands today, charging brands for maintaining a page on its platform is what is driving the company's revenue. Additionally, much like Facebook, brands are charged higher for leveraging options like boosting their pages on the platform.
In a market which has seen a menagerie of players like Ratan Tata-backed Firstcry and Mahindra Group's Babyoye blooming over the years, this fairly young startup is showing all the tell-tale signs of becoming a differentiated content-rich social network for parents.
"I do not think any one formula works in this industry," says Abidi. "The market is huge and there are many smart teams going after it. We are obsessed with understanding our users and that puts us in a unique position and sets us apart from competitors who are more established than we are today," he adds.
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Flipkart-backed Tinystep plans to be the mother of all parenting social network - Economic Times