A mothers experience is completely personalised on BabyChakra: Naiyya Saggi

One of the most reliable platform in India where you can shop items for your kids, ask for advice and also get good parenting tips from experts. In conversation with Indian Retailer, Naiyya Saggi, CEO & Founder of BabyChakra tells about this one single podium and how it can effortlessly connect you with other mothers, experts or child care services.

When and how did the idea behind this business crop up?
The trigger for starting BabyChakra came after I saw my sister struggle with the journey of being a new mother—spending copious amounts of time listening to random advice, browsing on Google, and experimenting with different doctors and daycares. There simply wasn’t enough reliable information out there for new parents. It was clear that there was an immediate need for a technology disruption in childcare. This led to the birth of BabyChakra.

What is your industry size as well and average ticket price?
The maternity and childcare market in India is estimated to grow to $74 billion by 2020, which is a ripe opportunity for technological disruption. With smartphone and data penetration, $7 billion of all transactions in this space will move online. The domestic market is highly fragmented with 200,000+ active unorganized services and 30,000+ small and large brands selling products. BabyChakra is the solution which integrates services and products into one go-to platform, and lets parents connect with experts and other mothers online, making life easier for a group who already lacks time and energy to search for trusted information.

What does your website offer apart from stuff for kids?
BabyChakra bridges the whole spectrum of a parent’s needs: community, content, commerce, and brings it together in a seamless way as a trusted, intelligent companion. Our interface, on both app and web, is completely personalized to the user based on her lifestage, location and interests. Our audience spans from expecting mothers to parents of toddlers up to five years of age.

What fee do you charge for expert opinion?
There is no fee for expert opinion. All mothers need to do is log on to the BabyChakra app and ‘Ask a Question’ on the feed. Within five minutes, she will receive number of answers from experienced mothers as well as top healthcare experts.

What is the price range of your products?
Our products range from Rs. 80-Rs.16000, across apparel, skincare, toys and more.

Our services include prenatal classes, lactation consultants, events and photography. Prices of services range from Rs. 800-Rs. 25,000.

How have you maintained a reliable foothold so far in this competitive business?
We built our platform community first, focussing on engaging the mothers on BabyChakra. Once we had built our kickass community of mothers online, we started venturing into other aspects of the business, like products and services, which was a unique move in the parenting space. Our community is at the core of BabyChakra.

What were the initial challenges faced?
In the first few days of BabyChakra, our main challenge was to understand what our users truly needed from us as a product. To answer our questions, we spent a lot of time understanding mothers’ and service providers’ requirements in this space. We spoke to nearly 600 influential mothers (top Mom bloggers, community leaders, Mompreneurs) and 500 top service providers in Mumbai. This helped us lay out the building blocks when we started work on the beta version of BabyChakra website.

What are the lessons learnt?
My main lesson has been to trust my gut. Early on as an entrepreneur creating a business model and venture first of its type globally, there is a lot of cynicism that you face. Today there are players in the pets & elder care space among others who are leveraging the BabyChakra model, not to mention other parenting ventures that have mushroomed and are building this sector alongside. My learning from this experience is to spend less time listening to the cynics and more time just building traction rapidly.

What sets you apart from your competitors?
Existing solutions for parents are static and not personalized to a user whose time is extremely limited: a mother does not have the time to sift through large amounts of information to find what is relevant and useful to her. A mother’s experience is completely personalised on BabyChakra.

What are your expectations from this business in future?
BabyChakra will become synonymous with parenting, globally, like Uber is to transportation, Amazon is to commerce and Airbnb is to vacations. We want to be the one platform that parents around the world trust and turn to. From the moment a couple is trying to conceive, they will think of BabyChakra as the companion to help them on their parenting journey - whether it be to find information, buy products or become part of a wider community.