Bhoomika Singh
Parenting is a journey that requires a lot of patience, love, and care. Humans have immense learning capability in the first three years of life, and it forms the foundation for lifelong learning. Parenting plays a pivotal role in unlocking a baby’s true potential. Every parent wants their child to have the best start in life, but it can be overwhelming to figure out how to provide that.
Due to the fast-paced lifestyles and rapidly evolving world today, it can easily be overwhelming. However, with the right set of tools and scientific approaches, parenting can be playful and enriching. Enter BabyG, a Mumbai-based app designed to help parents navigate the first three years of their child’s life.
BabyG app helps parents to prioritise their baby’s needs and provides chat consultations with child experts.
This platform also has a space where parents can access knowledge about health and nutrition, parenting basics, and bedtime stories. With all this, parents can understand their baby’s world better and spend quality time with them effortlessly.
The idea behind BabyG
BabyG is the brainchild of a group of parents, Birma Ram, Priyanka Zaveri and Apoorva and Anish Mulani who were frustrated with the lack of accessible information on child development. They wanted to create a solution that would make parenting easier and more rewarding.
Birma Ram, the founder of BabyG, spoke to SME Futures about how the idea came to be.
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“When I became a father, I was anxious like every other parent. I was wondering how I could give the best start to my baby, given that 85 per cent of brain development in babies takes place during the early years,” he tells us.
“My curiosity took me to different child experts, along with my friend and co-founder Apoorva Mulani, to find out ways in which we could stimulate babies,” Ram reminisces.
Birma Ram and Apoorva Mulani had a vision of how babies all over the world could benefit from science-backed playtime activities. They decided to create a small kit for their friends and families to use. The kit quickly gained popularity on WhatsApp, with hundreds of parents expressing interest in it.
Realising the potential of their idea, they decided to develop a full-fledged app that would provide a simple and effective programme for new parents. That’s how the app was launched during the pandemic in 2020. Although the initial focus was on India, the app soon attracted users from around the world, leading to the global expansion of the project.
How did they work through it?
With BabyG, parents have access to a wealth of resources, including developmental assessments, curated content, and a supportive community of fellow parents.
“Our focus has been on creating an ecosystem for early development, the only app a new parent will ever need. With a global tech DNA that is built to personalise the experience of each parent, our parents love us most for the simplicity of the programme and the app experience, while it covers their end-to-end needs,” he informs us.
He further states, “We want to make parenting super easy and fun while ensuring that the parents don’t have to worry about buying tons of things every month. This is the cornerstone of whatever we do.”
Raising BabyG was challenging too
Building something unusual and new to the market has its own kind of challenges. Both the founders of the app had to face quite a few challenges while building and launching it.
Speaking about the challenges, Ram tells us, “One of the challenges that we faced early on was to build a programme and an app that had global acceptance. To deal with this, we engaged experts from outside India and also adopted the animation style to provide an experience that is neutral.”
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“We tried to stay away from anything that is too specific to any one market at the beginning and slowly built a tech DNA to customize the app for various markets with ease. Now we can target new markets in a few weeks,” he further adds.
What does BabyG offer?
One of the key features of BabyG are its personalised developmental assessments. The app tracks a child’s milestones and offers insights into their progress.
The assessments are based on research-backed developmental frameworks, so parents can trust that they are getting accurate and reliable information.
Other features include milestone reports. These are the reports that parents can use the information from to identify the areas where their child might need extra support and adjust their parenting approach accordingly. Baby trackers are provided to log and analyse a baby’s sleep, feeds, poops & diapers. In addition to this, the platform offers audio bedtime stories which are age-based stories that spark the imagination of babies from early on, elaborates Ram.
But perhaps the most valuable aspect of BabyG is its community, says Ram. “Parenting can be lonely, but with BabyG, parents can connect with other parents who are going through the same challenges. We have a community of global like-minded parents to share our experiences with. The app offers a safe and supportive space where parents can ask questions, share their experiences, and offer advice,” he explains.
The platform offers regular live events and workshops hosted by experts in various fields, giving parents the opportunity to learn from the best. And there is a chat support feature which provides 24×7 parenting chat support for parents for any emergency.
In addition to all these features, BabyG offers curated content tailored to a child’s age and stage of development. “The parenting app management team and the advisory panel is a mix of early development specialists, child experts, technology creators, business professionals, and parenting enthusiasts,” he says.
The app’s team of experts selects articles, videos, and activities that are engaging and informative. Parents can learn about everything from nutrition to sleep to playtime, and they can feel confident that they are providing their children with the best possible care.
Accuracy and scaling up
The platform claims that the BabyG programme has been built by child experts who have years of experience like paediatricians, speech experts, occupational therapists, child psychologists, nutritionists, lactation experts, etc., and is aligned to the research from WHO, the American Academy of Paediatricians, the Child Development Centre, and the Indian Academy of Paediatricians.
Also, the algorithm learns from the data of 300k babies across the world to benchmark the growth charts for contemporary plotting.
“Our app has scaled so far through the word of mouth of supporting parents who are already benefiting from the programme. If anyone searches for baby development, baby milestones, etc., our app comes organically in the top results on the Play Store,” Ram tells us while talking about their expansion plans to reach a wider audience.
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“We plan to continue our growth through organic discovery, referrals, and content marketing to scale. We trust that product-led growth is going to be key for us in going global,” he further adds.
Evolution of parenting market
There are 400 million babies in the 0-3 years age group every year across the world, so the market is quite significant. However, Birma Ram believes that the penetration of parenting apps is very minimal.
“Overall, competition is good in this space for creating the large-scale adoption of the concept. Given that mobile-based support systems are picking up, the adoption of parenting and baby development apps in this space will continue to increase,” he tells us.
According to him, today’s modern-age parenting is driven by technology.
Technology is omnipresent and makes various services accessible to us at the fastest speeds. Even in the case of parenting, its useful. Ram claims that whatever a parent will need for their child’s development, BabyG is there to offer via its app.
“We will develop our app in such a way that parents continue to get the most trustworthy and easy-to-implement programmes. And as the science of baby development progresses, we will incorporate that into our programme too,” he asserts.
According to Birma Ram, BabyG is more than just an app – it’s a community of parents and experts dedicated to helping children thrive. With its unique features, BabyG can be a game changer for parents looking to give their children the best possible start in life.
Whether you’re a first-time parent or a seasoned pro, our app is all you need to help you to raise a happy and healthy child, he asserts.
Finally, the dedicated parent himself and the founder of this extraordinary app, Birma Ram, has some advice for those new-age entrepreneurs who want to jump into the parenting space. He says, “This is an exciting time for this space. If you are doing anything in the parenting or child development space, build it for the global markets to reap the benefits in the long term.”
