You might have heard, I was a semi-finalist for the Women 2.0 napkin business plan competition. Well, they informed me on May 3, I didn’t make the finals. Sigh. But trying to look on the bright side, I’m actually kind of relieved because now I can focus on networking and learning instead of being stressed out about giving my pitch! I’m starting to think I’ll have to get a job to support my entrepreneurial addiction. Too bad I didn’t get rich off of my first entrepreneurial endeavor…
I’d like to profusely thank Sylvester Becker (a.k.a. German Cowboy) of Dana Lynn Media for helping me pull together a very cool 2 minute pitch video which I can’t share with the world yet, but maybe soon. Sylvester was awesome to work with and so creative! We used crayons. We used Little People to illustrate our future customers as well as small figures of Dora the Explorer and her friends Boots and Benny. Although I think Boots got cut out in editing. My daughter loves Dora and in fact some people say she looks like her especially now with her new haircut.
I had already decided that even if I didn’t make the finals, I was going to the Women 2.0 conference (check out the site for the fabulous list of panel speakers – entrepreneurs and venture capitalists) this weekend in the Bay Area where the skies are blue, the weather is usually predictable, the money made in tech is gigantic, and everything is way too expensive. Except for, oddly, the reasonably priced rental car I got from Hertz. Thankfully, some friends are letting me crash at their place so I can save money by not getting a hotel.
Anyway, in case you are interested in the names of the finalists, here you go:
I’ll do a post about it after I get back, so Subscribe Now so you don’t miss a thing about my sure-to-be idyllic, fantastic, jaw dropping trip to Cali! I wonder if I can find a way to eat some sushi while I’m there…
We have some exciting news today that I just had to share! We did a press release with UpSpring Baby about our partnership to offer free subscriptions to Babble Soft web and mobile applications for customers who purchase their milkscreen product in Babies “R” Us! UpSpring is a great company with awesome women/mom entrepreneurs at the helm. Please let new parents know how they can try two cool products for the price of one. It’s sort of like you buy one, you get the higher priced item for free. Don’t you love those kind of offers. 😀
If you are a blogger, know a blogger, or a journalist who might be interested in telling their readers about it especially since it’s so close to Mother’s Day, I would be truly grateful if you mentioned it to them. Or even a Stumble of this post, would be so appreciated.
The press release is below and is also on our site and on PRWeb. I think it’s kind of cool that a Consumer Packaged Goods company and a Tech company are offering solutions for new moms, together in Babies “R” Us!
Babble Soft and UpSpring Baby Offer Free Subscriptions to Baby Insights for Milkscreen Customers
Customers who purchase a Milkscreen 3-pack, available at Babies “R” Us, will get a free subscription to Babble Soft web and mobile applications.
AUSTIN, TX – May 7, 2008 – For a limited time only, customers who purchase the MilkscreenTM 3-pack at Babies “R” Us and other retailers for $4.99, will get a free 3 month subscription valued at $19.95 to Baby InsightsTM and Baby Say CheeseTM!
“We are thrilled about the opportunity to provide our customers with access to Babble Soft’s unique web and mobile applications!” said Lisa Williamson, founder and CEO of UpSpring Baby. “Our customers use milkscreen as a simple, two minute test to detect alcohol in breast milk. Every woman metabolizes alcohol differently so milkscreen allows Mom to relax and remove the guesswork and Babble Soft’s Baby Insight’s product helps new moms keep track of their breastfeeding and pumping schedule as well as how much pumped milk they feed their baby. We feel that giving our customers the chance to try out easy-to-use tools to help them manage their breastfeeding and pumping schedules is a huge plus for busy moms.”
“Our goal at Babble Soft is to help make the transition into parenthood easier by taking some of the worry away about whether baby is getting what he/she needs.” said Aruni Gunasegaram, founder and CEO of Babble Soft. “We are excited about partnering with UpSpring Baby to not only offer their customers an easy way to try our Baby Insights application to help them track pumping and breastfeeding, but also our Baby Say Cheese first year online baby album with milestones and family tree.”
Baby Insights helps caregivers gain insight into baby’s breast & bottle feeding, sleep periods, diaper changes, medicine doses, immunization records, as well as mom’s breastfeeding, pumping and medicine intake. Having important information stored in one location makes communication between parents, their nanny, babysitters, grandparents, or doctors seamless and reliable and gives new parents insight into their baby’s patterns to help with crucial baby care decisions.
Baby Say Cheese lets you create a wonderful online baby’s first year photo album with milestones such as ‘first crawl, first smile, first word’ and family tree that you can share with friends and family. You can even send fun, cute picture postcards of any of your baby’s milestones to anyone with an email address!
About UpSpring Baby
UpSpring, founded in 2005 and based in Austin, Texas, is a premiere parenting and child consumer brand that consists of popular labels such as Walking Wings® and MilkscreenTM. Founded by momprenuers, the company is dedicated to offering parents and children the most innovative and trustworthy health, wellness and safety products available in the baby care industry. The founders are inspired by how many unmet needs still exist in the childcare industry and how many great ideas other parents have to offer. UpSpring, has worked with designers, medical experts and testing laboratories, to ensure fresh and more natural product alternatives that are safer and supportive for every facet of babies’ early childhood. To learn more, please visit us at http://www.upspringbaby.com.
About Babble Soft
Babble Soft is based in Austin, Texas and creates products that help make the transition into parenthood easier. Whether you need breastfeeding support, are experiencing baby sleep issues, are expecting twins, or taking care of a premature (preemie) baby and would like to create your baby’s first year album, Babble Soft offers unique, easy-to-use Web and Mobile software solutions that improve communication between caregivers. Babble Soft makes a great baby shower gift that you can easily send via Email to any new parent anywhere in the world! To learn more and purchase Babble Soft applications, please visit http://www.babblesoft.com.
I don’t often do a full on post about Babble Soft, but considering Mother’s Day is coming up on May 11, 2008 and we are offering 15% off of all subscriptions (click here for full press release) to Baby Insights and Baby Say Cheese using code MOTHER#1 on the Purchase Form through May 15, I figured it would be OK.
So for all the new moms out there who want a record of their baby’s newborn activities, who want a place to create a unique baby’s first year photo album with a family tree, who want a better way to communicate about childcare with their spouse, nanny, sitters, and family members, this one’s for you!
Gift subscriptions also make great Mother’s Day and baby shower gifts for those couples who you know will want breastfeeding support or see how often mom pumped and share when their baby ate, slept, and pooped! 🙂
I even came up with a poem that I had submitted for a local parenting related publication. It wasn’t selected so I thought I’d share it here. As you can tell, I didn’t major in poetry but I hope you like it anyway!
Motherhood and Childhood
What does it mean to be a mother?
Is it love?
Is it fear?
Is it feeling dear?
What does it mean to be a child?
Is it love?
Is it joy?
Is it having a favorite toy?
As mothers we hope for our child’s happiness
We pray for our child’s health
We hope they are treated with kindness
We pray our children find peace in the world
As children we live for today
We anticipate a life of fun
We hope for a million tomorrows
We cannot imagine a world without our mothers
As mothers we cannot imagine a world without our children
We are one and the same…
I made it to the semi-finals for the Women 2.0 business plan competition in California for my company Babble Soft! It’s so exciting because it’s a great opportunity to meet people who ‘get’ what I’m trying to do. People in Silicon Valley live & breathe social media and social networks which is very different than here in Texas. The grand prize includes some money ($1500) but more importantly access to a network of people with great experience! Here’s the email I got this morning:
Congratulations! You’ve made it to the semi-finals of Pitch 2008. This is the next step you should take.
Please log into your application via Angelsoft and upload a 2 min video pitch. Any pitches that are more than 2 mins will be disqualified.
Upload your video by Apr 20 2008, 11.59PM (PST). If we do not receive your video pitch by Apr 20 2008, you will be eliminated from the competition.
If you have already submitted a video, please ignore this message. You are only required to upload a 2 min video pitch. Do not upload any other files or presentations.
Please RSVP to this message so that we know you have received this email. Thanks.
All the Best,
Women2.0 Team
I guess my napkin handwriting skills were better than I thought! My husband, who has much better handwriting than I do, didn’t have time to help me, so I ended up doing it myself.
Now I have to submit a 2 minute video for a chance to make the finals. I haven’t done a video pitch for Babble Soft before so I’m not exactly sure what to do. Actually, I have never done a video pitch. Should I be formal about it? Should I have my kids in it? Should I walk through a slide deck? Should I beg, borrow, or steal a professional to help me with it? Should I just use our digital camera and record something in our house or should I do it outside, etc., etc., etc.?!?
I babble about business, babies, and parenthood on this blog, so those of you who come here to read my posts on entrepreneurship but do not have babies, please forward this post to your friends and family who do have babies. For those who have babies and dabble in business, these tips might be right up your alley. If you have babies and no interest in business, then send it on to the folks you know who are knee-deep in business and encourage them to have a baby! To read other great tips, check out the baby tips category.
Note: We didn’t use the above potty training contraption available from Amazon. I just thought it was a cute picture, and I might have tried it out if I had known about it. 🙂
5 Potty Training Tips That Will Make You Smile by Aruni Gunasegaram
My kids are now 5 ½ and 3 years old and fortunately the potty training gods smiled on us because both were day-time trained around 2 ½ years of age. Thankfully, our oldest (a boy) was trained about 2 months before our daughter was born. He wore Pull-Ups at night until he was 4 but our daughter quit wearing pull ups when she was about 2 years and 9 months old. Ah, it’s so nice not to have buy diapers or Pull-Ups anymore!
They each had a couple of night time accidents and we had a few more sheet changes with our son, but overall a less traumatic experience that I was bracing myself for. We did the following with our kids. Try these tips out and hopefully they’ll work for you.
1. Observe the signs. If your child is waking up dry from nap or night for at least a couple of weeks that is a big clue to start potty training. There are so many reasons to ‘ignore’ or not want to ‘see’ the signs that having your spouse, close friend or in our case a pre-school teacher throw some cold water in your face can really help. I was 8 months pregnant when our son’s pre-school teacher said you MUST potty train now. I was thinking to myself “are you crazy woman?! I can barely pick myself up let alone a toddler onto a potty.” I figured I’d wait until after the baby was born. I had been picking him up from pre-school and putting on a diaper/pull-up because I didn’t want to be unnecessarily cleaning a car seat. After being sternly warned by the teacher not to do that, I ended up putting a towel down on his car seat just in case.
2. Be consistent. When you are potty training make sure to take your toddler to the potty at least every 2 to 3 hours during the day. After a few weeks you’ll start to see the time between potty visits diminish. We observed that most accidents happened if we had forgotten to take them to the potty or were afraid to take them to the potty when they were in the middle of doing fun stuff for fear of the inevitable kicking and screaming.
3. Morning and Night. As soon as they wake up (even if it’s the crack of dawn and you’d much rather scream out loud than take them to the potty) put them on the potty. Even if they refuse to go, this will get them associating morning time with potty time and show them it’s OK to get up to go to the potty than to wet the bed. The same goes for night time. Put them on the potty right before going to bed so they create the same night time association as well.
4. Read a designated potty book. One of the things that worked really well for us with our son was identifying a potty book. I actually got this tip from Keys to Toilet Training by Meg Zwieback. Every night when we put him on the potty, we would read the same book to him. Since he was (and still is) so active, getting him to sit on the potty for any length of time was challenging. He liked reading the ‘potty book’ and because he sat longer he more often than not used the potty! This technique didn’t work so well with our daughter because she was fairly quick in going so she didn’t need to be entertained for long. Must be a girl thing (i.e., we’re less inclined to read newspapers and magazines while sitting on the toilet than guys are!)
5. Encourage and Reward. It is so important that you encourage and reward your toddler for going to the potty. You can do this with hugs, creating a chart, treats, activities, toys, etc. With our kids we used a chart that we would put smiley faces on when they went to the potty and sad faces if they had an accident. The chart gave them a visual to see how they were progressing and the act of us drawing a smiley face would make them so proud and happy! We also hugged them, gave them high 5’s, clapped, and sometimes gave them a Gerber fruit snack treat. When they went several days in a row without an accident, they would get to do something fun, get a treat, or better yet chose their own Spiderman or Dora the Explorer underwear!
Every child is different so try these tips and come up with your own that fit your unique situation. We used these tips and achieved pretty good potty-training results. Now, don’t go asking me about baby sleep tips because I’m still trying to figure out which ones worked and which ones didn’t!
The author of this article, Aruni Gunasegaram, is the President/Founder of Babble Soft, which offers web and mobile software applications that facilitate communication between caregivers by helping them with breastfeeding support bottle feedings, mom’s pumping, baby sleep patterns, diapers, immunizations and medicine doses as well as baby’s first year photo album.
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If you like this tip, you might be interested in these too:
Note to new readers: these tips are based on our experiences, as well as those of our friends and readers. Please always consult with your doctor before implementing any tip that might impact the health of your baby. If you have a tip you’d like to submit please send an email to blogger at babblesoft dot com. Please check the ‘baby tips’ category to make sure your tip (in some form or fashion) hasn’t already been posted. If it has been, feel free to comment on that post and support the tip. We also welcome respectful challenges to the tips because as is noted in our inaugural baby tip ‘everything is relative!’ We will, of course, give anyone who submits a tip we publish credit and lotsa link love!
So now we are about 2 ½ months and 3 ½ payments into Search Engine Optimization with SpryDev. We’ve made several changes to our site based on some great recommendations by Brian Massey at Customer Chaos and now we wait and measure the results. We have seen an increase in trial account sign ups and a few more sales, but I’m still waiting for the landslide! 🙂
I know it is sometimes an experimental process with keyword selection, and I know since we aren’t selling cupcakes (i.e., a well understood product) that things might take a little longer. I know all of this and yet I still want (dare I say need) to see those results immediately because I’m fundraising. With every presentation I make, the more users I can tell potential investors have signed up, the more compelling the story becomes and the chances of getting funding increase ever so slightly. Sort of a + b = c stuff. Sometimes those tiny incremental changes can make all the difference.
I was reading some blogs and came across a neat tool called Website Grader that tells you how your website ranks with regards to SEO. Social Media Mom mentioned it and when I ran the tool a distant memory was triggered because I was sure I had seen reference to this site before and lo and behold Pearl at Interesting Observations had mentioned it back in October 2007! I can’t remember the score I had on my blog when I ran it then, but I ran a report for both http://www.babblesoft.com/ and http://entrepremusing.wpengine.com/ and here are the results:
Babble Soft
Score: 67 out of 100 (a D grade – wah!)
Google PageRank: 5
Google Indexed Pages: 66
Last Google Crawl Date: February 25, 2008
Traffic Rank: Top 8.01%
Inbound Links: 2,815
I also discovered we were not yet listed in the Yahoo! Directory but that has since been corrected and now we are. We are still waiting for DMOZ and ZoomInfo to acknowledge our submissions. I know SpryDev has submitted us for many more directories. For some reason, this tool hasn’t really put the fact together that the related blog is this one. I hope at the next Google crawl date, we move out of the D range. Being the overachiever that I am, getting close to a failing grade makes me, well uh, let’s say not happy.
entrepreMusings
Score: 95 out of 100 (an A – yay!)
Google PageRank: 5
Google Indexed Pages: 334
Last Google Crawl Date: February 28, 2008
Traffic Rank: Top 4.08%
Inbound Links: 5,699
And that’s despite not being listed in Yahoo! or the other directories. I haven’t done any formal SEO on my blog (i.e., the report even tells me I don’t have page titles and descriptions) but I know the high rank is probably primarily due to the fact that I frequently update the blog making it fun and interesting for those Google spiders and my readers to reference.
So my conclusion is that even if you have hired an SEO firm, take time to check out other SEO tools out there like Website Grader. You might just find something to ask your firm about and learn something about the process along the way. Even the best of teams and people sometimes require a little oversight. If they are a good team, they won’t get defensive and they’ll work to fix it right away and make it up to you with hopefully more than yummy looking billiard cupcakes!
Stay tuned for more of my SEO journey that may involve cupcakes (or more likely other random pictures) by subscribing to my blog here! If you have an SEO experience you’d like to share, please don’t hesitate to leave a delicious comment below.
One of the interesting things about fundraising is the different perspectives you get from potential investors. If they spend enough time to really understand what you are trying to do, they offer great feedback, suggestions, and advice. They also sometimes ask a tough question or two.
I officially started the fundraising process a couple of weeks ago and have had a couple of meetings and a few more set up in the coming weeks. Since many of these angel investors are really busy, getting on their calendar can take weeks!
One question I was asked had to do with the cost of customer acquisition. It’s so hard to tell what that might be given the uncertainty and newness of many business concepts out there (including mine) today. I searched and searched and oddly only found very dated ancient info (i.e., 1999 – 2001) figures for sites like Amazon.com. At a high-level, the cost of customer acquisition is how much it costs to get a customer/visitor to your site. My guess is for sites with successful viral uptake like facebook the cost is in the cents (i.e. [total marketing and some R&D costs]/number of unique visitors). On the other hand I’ve heard that customer acquisition costs for companies like Vonage are in the hundreds of dollars. Anyone who has seen their mailers and expensive TV commercials can see why that number is so high. Last I heard I think it takes them at least 2 years to break-even on each customer they get.
I even had the MBA student who helped me create the financial model search his resources and no such luck. I would be happy to get information on even what the amount that a magazine like O Magazine or Pregnancy Magazine spends getting one customer to sign up. You’d think that as much has been written about facebook, that their cost per visitor would be somewhere on the Internet, but for some strange reason that information is not readily available. Go figure!
In my quest, I happened upon the following links that might be useful for any other entrepreneurs looking for the same information.
There may not be a satisfactory answer (or more likely I don’t have access to the money or resources to help me find it) but at least being aware that there could be an answer is probably not a bad thing. I ended up backing into some numbers using the information in our financial model which to me, the ever optimistic entrepreneur, seemed reasonable enough. 🙂
UPDATE: This post was re-published on Found|Read here. Check it out to see additional comments by their readers.
I’m so excited to say that the first official video of Babble Soft Applications went live today on DadLabs – Gear Daddy. I have wanted to do a video demonstration of our applications for a long time now but I was cycling through my entrepreneurial hats so fast, that I didn’t have the time or money to do a really nice one. So now thanks to all the cool dads at DadLabs we have our very first one and it cost me some beers was relatively free!
Go to their site and please Digg/Stumble the post if you like it. They are fellow entrepreneurs and the more hits/visits they get to their site the more loved they feel and more importantly the more cool advertisers they can attract. Sitter City is their sponsor this week. Plus they always make me laugh which is one of my 2008 goals! If you for some reason you need even more incentive to go to their site, I’ve embedded the video below:
I also just found out that it’s on YouTube also. So you can check it out there too:
As some of you know we signed up with a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) firm, SpryDev, back in mid-December. It’s been a great process and I already wish that we had our site designed with SEO in mind to being with. We are making several design, layout, menu, text, etc. changes that are very time consuming. I wish they could all be done overnight but given all of our time constraints unfortunately they can’t!
I think my biggest learning experience (note to self) so far is to have an SEO expert involved during the design of the site. It apparently will save a lot of time later. Now we won’t be sure if any of these changes will actually result in increased conversions for some time but so far they make sense to me. Apparently seeing results overnight doesn’t happen just like we can’t make all the changes overnight. Sigh.
The good news is in the past month we have seen a slight increase in the number of visitors. We’ve also seen more people finding us based on organic search (i.e., search terms in Google) versus a direct landing. Most people still find the Babble Soft site by searching on terms like Babble Soft, Baby Insights, Aruni (my name), etc. which is what I’m calling a direct landing. Since I’m not Britney Spears or some other famous person, it doesn’t really do us much good for people to be searching on my name! Now a noticeable few are finding us with relevant keywords.
Here are some of things we have done or are still working on:
Changing our menu navigation and adding cool buttons. All in the name of increasing conversion. Brian Massey who blogs at Customer Chaos is their conversion specialist and he’s given us some great recommendations that will hopefully pay off big time. Interestingly, he just did a great post called Here’s the Truth About Building Your Website that is pretty accurate.
Setting up a phone number to display on our site (should have that up soon – I need to record a great greeting message)
Adding Page Titles and Descriptions to each page. I can’t believe we hadn’t done that. DOH!! I guess that’s why they get the big bucks and further reason why we should have involved an SEO expert during the design phase of the site.
Building links.
Submitting articles, press releases, and other stuff to all the various sites that love them as much as we do. 🙂
Rose, our project manager at SpryDev seems to be very patient since I email her night and day asking her what else we can do and how fast we can do it. When it’s your personal credit card that gets hit each month you want to do everything possible to start seeing sales come in to offset those expenses.
Did I know that we would have to make some changes to our site going in? Yes, of course. Did I realize the extent of the changes, the time it would take to make them, and that cash wouldn’t start rolling in the door 10 seconds after we made each change? Not so much.
If you are interested in learning more about “What They Don’t Tell You About SEO,” go ahead and subscribe to this blog. If you know more about SEO than I do (chances are you do), then leave a comment and share your wonderful wisdom with the rest of us!
Picture by Sandy Blanchard Choosing a corporate attorney is an interesting endeavor. I have avoided using attorney’s for Babble Soft in the past because a) they are very expensive, b) sometimes they make you feel like they need to review everything you do for fear of some horrible thing happening, and c) I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with my life what my strategic business plan was. Since I have a new business strategy and have decided to raise funds, an attorney is a must have.
I’ve met with a couple and spoken to a few more. The first I spoke to was the attorney at my first company and although I would love to work with her we both agreed that the firm she is at now is catered more for more established businesses (i.e., very, very expensive). It is so much better to understand that up front because we have worked on many outside projects together, and I consider her a friend.
The second attorney I spoke to was referred by another entrepreneur in the area. I liked her and her partner but a few things gave me pause. One potential area of risk is the fact we might end up doing business with the other entrepreneur’s company which might result in a conflict of interest. They had good rates and good experience but did not have an in-house tax attorney. Since Babble Soft is currently an LLC and we’d like to continue as an LLC for at least our first round of financing, having someone who understands the tax implications could be important.
The third attorney I met had done some pro-bono work for me a year or so ago because I guess he knew I couldn’t afford his services at the time. What I liked about him is that he does have a tax attorney in his firm, has represented several small companies in the technology space, one of my business Advisor’s has worked with him in the past, he was on time for our meeting, said he could help with introductions to potential investors, and he sent a brief follow-up note after our meeting expressing his interest in working with me. However, his rate is $125/hour more than the attorneys at the second firm I spoke with!
Special thanks to @princess_belle who blogs at GloKay, @chelpixie who blogs at Chelpixie.com, and LPT who blogs at Direct2Dell who tweeted me things to think about and questions to ask the attorneys. I plan on making a decision in the next couple of weeks so if you have attorney stories or suggestions to share with me or the blogosphere, please leave a comment. Thank you!
If you are a regular reader of my blog you have no doubt caught on to the fact that I have begun the fundraising effort for Babble Soft. If you are new you might want to check out The Entrepreneurial 7 Year Itch to get some background.
I’m currently working on creating a business plan comprehensive executive summary (who has time to write read a 30-50 page business plan?!?), the financial assumptions and projections (with assistance from an MBA student), creating screen mock-ups of our new applications (with Projekt202, a fabulous local design company), and setting up meetings with potential angel investors. This process is an ongoing, reiterative process that can sometimes make you want to pull your hair out. As soon as you type the last character on your plan, it is outdated because something has changed somewhere that you may or may not know about. Strange but true.
While doing all that, I also need to finish software testing of our new Baby Insights mobile application, learn more social media, make SEO changes, make sales, establish partnerships, and make progress toward meeting my 2008 New Year’s Goals! Hmmm something might have to give here…
Stay tuned for more about my journey to persuade people to part with their money in exchange for hopefully a lot more money at some time in the future…
I’ve seen companies doing soft launches of software products which makes me wonder what a hard launch is. So far the main difference I’ve noticed is that the official press release about the new application or new feature doesn’t go out until after the ‘hard’ launch. My guess is that a lot of bug fixing is going on between soft and hard launch.
So, I’m happy/thrilled/ecstatic to report that we just soft launched our new sleep and immunization recording features of Baby Insights Web! We are still working on some development issues on Baby Insights Mobile and plan to hard launch that app in January 2008. The mobile app is not web-based (yet) so we don’t have the luxury of a soft launch.
Babble Soft is offering FREE 3 month gift subscriptions valued at $19.95 until March 15, 2007 to anyone who discovers a software bug in our NEW Baby Sleep and Immunization features of Baby Insights Web. Gifts are transferrable! Sign up for your FREE account today. Happy hunting!
So far the soft launch has been uneventful (i.e., no major bugs), which is nice. Thanks go out to our development team Cressanda and especially our project manager. I recommend them highly. The smoothness of the soft launch is also because we don’t have thousands upon thousands hundreds upon hundreds of users yet. I’m banking on our foray into SEO to help get us there. I mean if the “right people” (a.k.a. target market) don’t know we exist; it’s not surprising that we don’t have thousands of users yet. Even viral marketing takes a bunch of upfront work because you have to get to the right early adopters who have major Internet influence. I need to figure out how to do a video and get it in YouTube.
Given the fact that over 4 million babies are born in the US each year then include Australia, Canada, Europe, Japan and other Internet savvy countries, I’m anticipating that once those new parents and nannies find out about us, the floodgates will open. Babies and floodgates…not sure if the analogy works but I think you get the point. 🙂
I’ve been spending my time the last couple of days doing website updates to reflect the new features. And I’m working on pulling the pieces together of a business plan for some potential angel investor meetings that I have scheduled for early next year. If you know an angel investor (or you happen to be one) who likes the baby/new parent/web application/social networking space, please send them my way! The applications we have now are only the tip of the colossal iceberg.
Now for a short SEO break:
Whether you need breastfeeding support, are excitedly following your pregnancy week by week, are experiencing baby sleep issues, or are already under way creating your baby’s first year album, Babble Soft offers unique, easy-to-use Web and Mobile software solutions that improve communication between caregivers about baby’s and mom’s schedules.
Baby Insights helps caregivers keep track of baby’s breast & bottle feeding, sleep periods, diaper changes, medicine doses, and immunization records, as well as mom’s breastfeeding, pumping and medicine intake. Having important information stored in one location makes communication between parents, their nanny, babysitters, grandparents, or doctors seamless and reliable and gives new parents insight into their baby’s patterns to help with crucial baby care decisions. Baby Say Cheese lets you create a wonderful online baby’s first year photo album with milestones and family tree that you can share with friends and family.
If you are interested in reading about how I cope with manage software launches, fundraising, and SEO consider subscribing to this blog’s feed. If you are an entrepreneur, it will be worth your while…even if I crash and burn….which I won’t…because I said so, that’s why. Now go play with your Power Rangers. Sigh.
As I contemplate a plan to raise angel financing for Babble Soft in 2008, I have begun mentally preparing myself for the inevitable ups and downs of the process. I have raised funds to the tune of $15 million as founding CEO of my first start-up, Isochron, back before the first Internet bubble burst, so I have that experience to leverage. But that was just over 7 years ago and a lot has changed since then.
Isochron, which we started as part of a business plan competition back in 1997, was sold in 2002 after the bubble burst. I had already left in 2001, but Erin stayed on for two more years until 2003. The Founders/employees were washed out (i.e., got nothing) and the Investors got only a small fraction of their invested capital back. At that time many companies were just disappearing all together. When it was sold, Isochron was on its 4th CEO with me being the first. Now it’s on its 5th, is still operating and as I understand it doing reasonably well, but not the high growth trajectory we had hoped for back when we started. Looking back, if we (and our investors) had truly understood Porter’s 5 Forces we would have approached the business differently or maybe even run the other way because with a customer like Coca-Cola you don’t have much negotiating power! But hey, we were young entrepreneurs (I was 27 – what did I know? ) who felt we could conquer the world of distribution to and maintenance of vending machines and other equipment after that. Mostly because we were tired of going to school vending machines and them being out of stock of what we wanted so we figured we could help sove that problem with creative technology.
Since then, I have taken time to decompress, teach entrepreneurship at the University of Texas at Austin business school, have two amazing kids, consult, and dabble with the notion of Babble Soft. Erin and I did some development and had a beta product ready in 2005 to use when our daughter was born, but it really wasn’t until 2007 when we launched our Web application and she started full time care, that I became serious about committing to the bigger vision of Babble Soft. I quit straddling the mental fence probably around October of 2007 and jumped squarely onto the side of the fence that has a vast open field with mountains, land mines, cool rivers, placid lakes, tornados, sunny skies, rainy days, ego bruises, good decisions, bad decisions, no money, fun, and most importantly a yet to be discovered journey!
After Isochron, I didn’t think I’d ever want to do a tech startup again. It was hard. It was tiring. I aged. It was stressful. I was disillusioned. It didn’t end like I had hoped/planned it would. But if you read my Entrepreneurial Self Portrait, you’ll see that I since discovered that it is in my blood. Looking back, I wouldn’t trade the experience and lessons learned for anything!
Do I wish I had made the decision earlier to dive head first into Babble Soft or another tech company? Sometimes, because I spent money on the wrong things due to not being focused/committed, which leaves us less money to spend now and means I have to raise funds sooner than I might have had to. But I know deep down I will not regret the decision I made to stay home with my kids when they were babies, work from home, and maintain a fairly flexible schedule for them. So maybe now’s the right time to really scratch my 7 year entrepreneurial itch! 🙂 This time I want to make sure I laugh a lot more…which is not hard to do with little kids around.
Stay tuned for more stories about my start-up journey. Next up in this series will be a subjective post on the pros and cons of raising outside capital.
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To help illustrate how different people use Babble Soft web and mobile applications, we have created family user stories. I am grateful to the families who are willing to share their time, pictures, and energy to write/edit these case studies with us! To see our other user stories please check out our Testimonial page or click on the user stories tag.
Jacob, Lea and Chris’s first child, was born via unplanned C-section after a long and arduous labor. While in the hospital, Lea was asked to keep track of Jacob’s feeding and diaper activities using generic paper hospital forms. She had planned on entering the information into Baby Insights, which she had already set-up prior to Jacob’s arrival. Unfortunately the papers were lost in the shuffle between the hospital and home, so she started entering information into Baby Insights four days after Jacob was born.
Prior to leaving the hospital, Jacob’s pediatrician recommended formula supplementation as Lea was concerned about breastfeeding following the c-section. Lea’s milk did not fully come in for over a week, and with breastfeeding, pumping and formula feeding, using Baby Insights was tremendously helpful in keeping track of Jacob’s feeding schedule and intake. Baby Insights was also very helpful in tracking Jacob’s diaper activities. A feature of Baby Insights that Lea wasn’t initially aware of, but came to use extensively, was medicine dose recording. She was taking three separate pain medications to aid in her recovery from the C-section.
Lea’s Experience
The information I got from using Baby Insights was so helpful! I really liked the fact that I could go to one place and see all of Jacob’s information at a glance. In hindsight, I wish I had bought a PDA or smart phone before Jacob was born to make entering the information easier! Some of the benefits I gained from using Baby Insights are:
Since we were supplementing with formula, it helped to see how much formula versus breastfeeding time he was receiving. It’s been fascinating to see how the two amounts have changed over time. The Daily Summary report was beneficial as it calculated the total amount of milk we gave to Jacob.
It was great to see how much I was pumping to get an idea of how much he was getting at each feeding. Knowing this helped me make decisions about how often and how much to supplement.
As a first time mom, managing my time throughout the day can be quite challenging. Baby Insights helped me see how much time I was spending breastfeeding and pumping so I could better plan my day.
Tracking my pain medication using Baby Insights was particularly helpful during my recovery from the C-section. I was taking 3 different pain medications at varying times and being able to view my medication schedules became one of my favorite Baby Insights tools!
—End—
If you are interested in participating in your very own user story, please activate a FREE Babble Soft Account. If you find that Babble Soft applications work for you, you want to tell the world about your great experience, and you are interested in being a part of our media campaign, please email us at info at babblesoft dot com for more information and a hook-up! 🙂 We plan to do a family story every one to two months so please let us know as soon as possible if you are interested.
Since I have been overcome with software testing, deciding on a full-service SEO firm, addressing Holiday cards, doing the company books, staring into space, and looking for other people who will help me for free, for reduced fees, for a free lunch, with all of the other stuff I need help with, I did not notice until a few days later when I checked her blog that she mentioned Babble Soft. Oh and yeah, she didn’t link to my blog so I didn’t realize she was writing about me. 🙂
Here is her off-the-cuff list of potential markets for Babble Soft:
Babble Soft has two groups of people to which they can market, parents and non-parents. To save space, we’ll just talk about parents here. In the parent category, we have:
– Mothers who are anal retentive.
– Fathers who dig all the latest technology.
– Parents who live in the US and are subject to the BULLSHIT PARENTAL LEAVE laws, forcing them to go back to work too early.
– Parents of multiples.
– Parents who work opposite shifts.
– Parents with older kids, especially those with high needs.
– Mothers with post-partum depression. (When you’re depressed, you need someone to think for you.)
That’s off the top of my head. If Babble Soft were to specifically target any one of these groups and market to them appropriately, she’d have more customers than she’d know what to do with. That’s not even getting into potential baby shower gifts, gifts from distant grandparents, gifts from nagging grandparents, gifts from over involved grandparents, etc.
Nothing surprising there and they all make sense to me. I made the comment on her blog that even if you aren’t depressed but you are sleep deprived (probably the same thing) and you can’t stand your spouse, you need someone to think for you. 😉
The challenge as an entrepreneur is how to do that with extremely limited resources and no budget. Anybody invented effective cloning technology yet?
I haven’t done any formal Internet marketing to date, but I’m biting a big financial bullet next week and that will soon be changing. We’ve done some PR (press releases, traditional media stories) but no one at the big publications like Parenting, Pregnancy Magazine, Parents, etc. will give us the time of day because [fill in the blank.]. I can’t afford to pay $15K+ to advertise on sites like that or on the granddaddymammy of baby sites babycenter.
Since this dilemma is just one of the reasons why entrepreneurship is not for the faint of heart or the sane, I guess I’ll go see about answering Shane and Peter’s Interviewing You: The Entrepreneur post this pleasant, unusually warm December Saturday afternoon while my daughter and husband nap and my son works on a Transformer puzzle on the floor next to me…
Mother: Lea (Financial Reporting Manager)
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