Online Services Let Parents Track and Share Children Growth
As a dad, seeing my son Wynn growing day by day is a really rewarding experience. My family has a notebook that tracks Wynn's daily activity, such as his diet, his sleep, when he first dose what(eg: roll himself to lay on his stomach). I also has a friend writing journals with pictures attached to detail his daughter's growth.
Two startups are trying to help parents keep track of and showcase the growth of their children online.
kidmondo offers very good features such as
- Growth charts - track your child's height, weight and dental growth.
- Medical journal - store and update medical records of doctor visits and immunizations.
- Food journal - monitor your child's diet and remember those messy meals.
- Interactive timeline - view your child's life at a glance and see all they have accomplished.
But they offer very little data storage: 500MB for the the $10/month plan. I can take 500MB pictures and videos of Wynn in 3 months. They should offer unlimited storage because
- Storage is cheap
- Parents takes a lot of pictures and photos of their children. You don't want a user to worry about "Am I going to run out of space" and "Which photos/videos should I remove because I am running out of storage"
Another startup totspot wants to be a place "for parents to publish a page about their kids and share with family and friends." Sounds good! But it's unclear to me what they exactly offer until I went to the sign up page. But I am not sure why they don't list out their features one by one on the homepage just like kidmondo does.
Both sites have explicitly stated their commitment to privacy and provide access control for close friends/family. I value that commitment highly as Wynn has his own privacy. That's why I don't post his pictures publicly online.
The exit strategy for these two niche market companies can be getting acquired by a big parental/baby network like BabyCenter.
Revenue-wise, once they can get parents to subscribe their services for a while, they've locked up revenues for years to come because it will be a hassle for parents to take all the growth /tracking info elsewhere. No parents want to give up this valuable memory.
Secondary, there are a LOT of opportunities for partnerships and sponsored offering to sell to parents with children. Parents spend a lot of money(eg: 250k dollars) over the growing period of their children. Parents basically tell these sites everything about their children. so the sites know when and what to recommend to parents based on the stage of their children and the collective data from all other children/parents. Examples:
- when a child turns 5 months old, they can send parents a note like: "Jason needs to start eating solid food starting in a month. 3 out 5 parents on the site recommend x brand"
- when a child's birthday is coming up, they can send birthday gift suggestions
These sites can also partner with hospitals to provide these kinds of child growth monitoring services.
Parenting is a great rewarding experience. It's good for parents to get help from these online services to enrich the experience. For now, I am going to stick with my hand-written notes to track Wynn's growth. I am waiting to see these services mature, then I'd pick a provider.
