Modern parenting isn’t easy and the demands it places on parents and more specifically, Mums, can make it quite stressful. From taking decisions on schooling, to what classes to send the kids to, planning holidays to organizing play dates, scheduling daily pick-ups and drops for kids to managing their own careers and home, mothers simply have a lot on their plate to deal with.
Vishal Gupta, Prashant Sinha and Asif have come with their unique initiative named Mycity4kids in 2012 to provide relief to the parents from hassle free life.
Mycity4kids is a mobile platform for today’s multi-tasking Mum by giving her access to everything she needs, in one place.
It is the largest Discovery platform for kids’ services and events with more than 75,000 service providers across 9 cities. Around 3 million Mums visit the site every month to consume this content which is a good indicator of how popular the site is, at an overall level. Within this, the most popular content on mycity4kids is the blogs contributed by Mums where they share their stories on the joy and frustration that constitute parenthood. It’s popular because every Mum feels that she’s not alone and that there is someone else, going through exactly the same experience, good or bad, making it a virtual support group for the entire Mum community. It has a very large mommy Blogger platform with close to 1200 bloggers and 10000 blogs.
Vishal Gupta shares about his company and its feature in an exclusive interaction with BWdisrupt.The Void To ExploitA lot has changed since we were children impacting the flow of parenting knowledge. Nuclear families, moving across cities, working spouses, virtual communities are some examples of this change. The result of all this is that unlike earlier when parenting knowledge flowed vertically from grandparents to parents, we see a shift in that knowledge flow is much more horizontal, with peer group advice from other Mums playing a much larger and more influential role. Our platform facilitates this exchange of knowledge between Mums, thereby ensuring that the job of parenting never overtakes the joy of parenting.
Lastly, as a parent, one is always looking for places to take the kids to – whether it is a weekend outing or heated swimming pools in the Delhi winter. All this content is readily available city-wise on mycity4kids – right from the heated swimming pools for winters, to cycling tracks for kids and so on, making parenting life so much more fulfilling.
App Features
Parents can learn from other Mums & Experts with the best Parenting blogs. They can create their own Blog and discover great Events and Resources for children in the city. Mothers can also organize their kids’ daily schedule with a color-coded Calendar and can involve their spouse and support system by creating a shared calendar that can be jointly accessed.
Funding StatusWe have raised total funding of $3.5 million. Last Round of funding was held in Jan'16 and $2.5 million was raised from SIDBI Venture Capital and YourNest Angel Fund. We have had our first Round of funding in Jun'12 wherein we raised $1 million from YourNest Angel Fund.
Traction DetailsMycity4kids parenting app is available on both Android & iOS platforms and has over 40,000 downloads.
The mix of blogs, curated lists, events and summer camps and resources for children make it a must-have for every Mum. We just added the ‘Add a Blog’ functionality on the app and now receive more than 300 blogs a month through the app alone.
Future PlansCurrently we focus on 0-14 age group & therefore you’ll see an extensive set of services ranging from Fun places to go, all about birthdays, education (schools/ playschools), hobbies, sports, tuitions, enhanced learning, shopping and health & wellness. As we forge ahead, we’ll enlarge this age group (from -9 to +14), thereby also focusing on services related to pregnancy, prenatal, maternity, newborn etc.
Our expansion plans are focused on becoming a daily-use product for every mother.The objective is to increase the monthly website visits from 3million to 5million. Also increase the blogger network from 1200 to 5000 mommy bloggers in next one year.
To continue with our expansionary policies, we plan to provide our services to 7 more cities to cater to a total of 16 cities. It will be exciting to explore the experiences of parents in other cities of India and enrich our content with the inputs and cultural practices of these areas.
Marketing PlansOur plan is focused on distributing our curated editorial content and user-generated blogs through social media. We are also adding videos and languages to enhance content. To enhance a sense of belongingness to the group among parents, with an aim to develop a trust-based relationship through shared experiences, we are building a community through common interest-based groups.
Challenges FacedThe most challenging part of the journey has been to identify what will make a Mum come to mycity4kids every day. It took us a while to throw away our ‘large-corporate hats’ and understand that and every other element of the marketing mix were levers to be turned.
BW Reporters
This is Meghna Shukla. She lives in Delhi. She is an engineering graduate and currently pursuing MBA from Jaypee Business School. She has a work experience of 2 years in content development. She loves to read and write.
