Naming your lil’ one?? nameRnewborn Allows You to Tell the Community What You Want in a Name for Your Baby

Started in June 2016, Hyderabad-based nameRnewborn.com is Indian crowdsourcing platform for naming newborns. In three simple steps Parents harness the power of the people on the internet (the Crowd) to gather (Source) a large pool of relevant names. The collective creativity of our Namers (Crowd brain) helps parents name their newborns!

The startup was founded by Ratnakar Poduri and Srikanth Poduri. Ratnakar has over 13 years of consulting experience working with tech industry heavyweights such as Hewlett Packard and Accenture. Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics and Statistics from Osmania State University in Hyderabad, subsequently earning a Master’s of Science degree in Mathematics from Indiana State University. Ratnakar also runs a test prep company and have coached 650+ high school students for their SAT’s / ACT’s for over nine years.

Srikanth worked with various Fortune 500 companies and IT start ups as VP - Corporate Strategy. He was instrumental in contributing towards the overall growth of the organization. Srikanth is a qualified management professional and holds Masters in Business Information Systems from Karlshrue, Germany and a MBA from Symbiosis, Pune.

BWDisrupt team member Sujata Sangwan interacts with nameRnewborn’s Founders and spoke to them

Why this idea?

When we were expecting our kid, both of us were working fulltime in demanding environments. TIME was a major constraint to focus or research baby names. We were also living in the US away from immediate family. YES friends and family pitched in with few naming suggestions but they were limited. Internet had pointless innumerable lists of names that every second kid we met carried. With trends and tastes changing, we were looking for new avenues and across cultures to name our kid.

We also noticed that there are lot of people facing the same issues mentioned below as we did -

1. Busy with demanding lifestyles and want to simplify the baby naming process, yet come up with a cool name at a fraction of a buck.
2. can't crack the perfect name based on their requirement ( eg starting alphabet, numerology, birth star ...)
3. want numerous distinctive suggestions, cross culture names but don't have enough creativity and subject matter expertise

Why will people pay when content is available for free?

Internet has a large collection of baby names, every baby naming website has the same set of static collection (around 10,000) which is very obsolete and with ZERO user experience.

Unique Key Features

We are the only crowdsourcing platform in India for naming newborns. Our platform facilitate web based baby names contests, acting as a two-sided market place. All the participants (Parents and Namers) are benefited in the entire process. Our approach is an act of taking a task traditionally performed by a friends and family and outsourcing it to an , generally large group of people - tapping the minds of many.

1. The Parent completes a questionnaire specifying their baby name preferences and kick starts a PAID contest the platform for say Rs.100.
2. Enthusiastic, intelligent and creative public contestants (Crowd) will participate and give several hundred suggestions based on the parent's REQUIREMENTS. Since all contests are incentive driven, crowd will be motivated to come up with quality recommendations. Parents can rate the all the submissions, actively communicate with the crowd to provide their feedback to refine any submissions and Social-share with near and dears for opinion poll.
3. Parents will finally choose the name (winning name) they like the most. The platform will award a Rs.90 cash prize to the Namer who submitted the winning name and keeps Rs 10 as service fee.

Funding & Monetization

Currently we are bootstrapped and are actively looking to raise money. We charge 10 % service fee from each contest.

Future Plans

Just like Amazon and Flipkart started out selling books and later entered into other domains, we too want to initially stabilize our core platform, business processes and run at least 500 baby naming contests before venturing into parallel verticals.

Our grand goal is to build a one stop shop marketplace for competition based crowdsourcing (competitions awarding monitory rewards for to selected entries).

Market size

• With close to 1.2 million searches for "Indian Baby Names" and its affiliate keywords per month on and more and more people embracing the internet for baby names, itself indicates the need and demand.
• Total Internet Users in India - 462 million (35% of the total population)
Total NRI internet users - 10.5 million (35% of 30 million)
Total Indian + NRI Internet users - 473 million (This is market size of namers or contributors who are unpaid customers)
• 65% of Indian population in under the age of 35 (prospective client base), 50% under the age of 25 and 35% (around 460 million) of Indian population are internet users (growing at 4-6% every year)
Implies 307 million Indian Internet users are under the age of 35 (65% of 473 million)
307 million could be a guesstimated paid customer base
• According to the Registrar General of India, there are 49,481 births per day growing at 1.2% annually