Parenting Platform mycity4kids is Targeting a Revenue of Rs 23 Cr in This Financial Year
mycity4kids which was incorporated in April 2012 by Vishal Gupta along with Prashant Sinha and Asif Mohamed, is the largest content platform for Mothers in India. The company provides a platform for mothers to share experiences and discuss relevant parenting and women’s issues. Their belief is that for every experience a Mum is going through, there is another Mum who has been or is going through exactly the same experience. By enabling the sharing of experiences, the company aims to help Mums feel that they are not alone in their journey.
The platform also provides content in vernacular languages like Hindi, Marathi, Bengali, Tamil, Kannada, and Telugu which has helped the platform spread its geographical reach. The most popular content is blogs shared by mothers on the joys and frustration that constitute motherhood. The Mommy Blogger platform has 4,000 bloggers and 30,000 blogs and has witnessed exponential growth with 7 million Mums visiting the site every month.
The idea of coming up with mycity4kids was born with the fact that circumstances have changed since the childhood time of the founders which in turn has largely impacted the flow of parenting knowledge. Nuclear families, moving across cities, working spouses, and virtual communities are some examples of this change. This is what motivated the founders to form mycity4kids.
There was a time when parenting knowledge came vertically from grandparents to parents, but that flow is more horizontal now, thanks to peer group advice. Mycity4kids facilitates this exchange of knowledge between Mums, thereby ensuring that the job of parenting never overtakes the joy of parenting.
The special feature is the blogs contributed by Mums. It is popular because every mom feels she’s not alone and there is someone else going through exactly the same experience, good or bad, making it a virtual support group for the entire community.
mycity4kids has also developed India’s first video channel for Mums called Momspresso which captures Indian nuances related to parenting and motherhood. The company has a self-serve platform with 90 percent of our content being user generated, unlike other platforms. Coming from Mums, the content on the website is authentic and covers all the issues that Mum face in their day-to-day life, making it relevant from every Mum out there. This content is available in English and 5 regional languages as the company strongly believes that the need for this type of content is universal.
mycity4kids has a sustainable business and revenue model that will see the company turning profitable in the next quarter. Mr. Vishal Gupta and the other co-founder have worked in companies like HUL, Pepsi and Asian Paints and hence it is easier for them to think through challenges that brands face and build appropriate solutions.
The platform has raised close to Rs 20 crores from YourNest Angel Fund and SIDBI Venture Capital Ltd.
mycity4kids has developed a robust revenue model that is unique in terms of engagement opportunities for brands targeting Mums. There are products targeted at different stages of the sales funnel. They range from content (including videos) and influencer marketing programs, to blogger meets and product reviews. These are the solutions that brands like Dettol, Nestle, Horlicks, J&J and Pampers have made use of to interact with the mycity4kids community. mycity4kids currently works with more than 60 brands.
The company closed the last financial year with revenues of Rs 6.5 crores and is targeting a revenue of 23 crores in this financial year. The founders came from backgrounds where the product was mostly fixed and product launches/re-launches took place every couple of years or so. It took them sometime to realize that the key to success in the digital world was to keep iterating on the product. Vishal agrees that this mental block was the biggest challenge they faced for the first few years. The second challenge was to seed and scale the user-generated content. By makings few big tweaks buts lots of small ones, the company was gradually able to overcome this challenge.
The Mum demographic is an extremely valuable in that the same person is the key decision maker for products related to the children, the household and of course, herself. It is no surprise therefore that an estimated 55% of advertising monies or 33,000 crores is spent on this Mum demographic annually. While this is expected to double in the next 4-5 years, digital spends which are at Rs. 3,350 crore right now is expected to quadruple to 13,400 crore by 2020. mycity4kids is best positioned to leverage this growth.
mycity4kids today is the largest content platform for Mums in India with more than 7 million visits every month. It has a huge Mommy Blogger platform with close to 4000 bloggers and 30,000 blogs. The brands associated with mycity4kids include Horlicks, Nestle, Pampers, Dettol, Johnson & Johnson and Quakers among others. mycity4kids currently engages with more than 60 brands and intends to take this number to 100 by the end of this financial year.
The company has identified regional language content and video content as the two big growth drivers for it. Mycity4kids already has more than a 1000 Hindi blogs and 250 videos since the launch earlier this year.
Authentic content is key to gaining trust because Mums can intuitively see through everything that is not. The company wants to help ensure that the job of parenting never takes over the joy of parenting.
