Kidsstoppress becomes an online sounding board for parents
Mansi Zaveri was excited but also anxious when she became pregnant for the first time. Many questions ran through her mind: Will I know if the baby falls ill? What if I overfeed or underfeed the baby? Can I juggle office and home? And so on.
Even after her daughter was born, she was always in a quandary over whether she was doing the right thing for the baby. It took her two babies, a cool job, numerous hours of work, play time at the park, meeting inspiring fellow moms and sleepless nights to feel confident about being a mother.
Mansi knew that every parent goes through this tortuous learning process, and decided to give them some assistance. That's when she put together Kidsstoppress.com -- "a website that helps parents make informed decisions," Mansi says.
Kidsstoppress.com covers every aspect of a child’s life, be it food, travel, activities, events, services or shopping, and has parents sharing their experiences. “In my journey to discover the best for my child, I understood that the only person whose opinion matters to me when I am deciding something for my child is another mother's,” Mansi says.
Not just a mommy blog
A one-stop guide to raising kids and having fun while raising them – that's what Mansi wanted to build. “There was enough information available online but none of it was India-specific. Here every city comes with its own specific challenges. I was working fulltime and so had limited access to what other moms had to say on what's good or bad for children. But what I did have was access to was technology. That’s when I began thinking about how I could combine both,” she recalls.
“Though we have countless services and media dedicated to sharing news on restaurants, movies, concerts and so on, nothing tells you if a new park has opened or flamingos are visiting or a children's museum in Delhi is holding a special show or what kids can expect at Rani Baug, Byculla Zoo or Sanjay Gandhi National Park,” she says of the unmet need Kidsstoppess addresses. “Also, as kids' products are expensive, I like feedback from other moms.”
No kidding
Mansi launched Kidsstoppress.com from Mumbai, all by herself, in June 2011, two years after her first child was born. Since then, she has been its Blogger-in-Chief. Though she had eight years of experience in advertising and branding, retail and lifestyle, and despite her last posting as the Head of Marketing & Communications for French Connection, UK (FCUK) in India, building the website was a new experience and a big challenge and monetising it was a big challenge, initially.More than a mommy blog or baby centre, KSP was conceived as a kids lifestyle website which shares the latest brands, services and events for kids in the country, thus giving entrepreneurs in this space the opportunity to connect with the right audience.
It was difficult at the outset to get owners of brands and services to understand how online and digital media could make a difference to their business. But the attitude changed over the years.
“They are a lot more aware today and now they do understand the relevance of being listed online. They understand that being online helps them publicise an update quickly and widely compared to a conventional listing in a monthly magazine.”
Over the last two years, she has had a bunch of young and dynamic people who are very tech savvy working on Kidsstoppress part-time, and two full-timers.
“We started with 100 visitors a day and today, have over 60,000 visitors. We get over 120,000 pageviews a month with 35% repeat visitors,” Mansi says.
They partner with many offline children's events too in different cities. They launched Kidsstoppress Consulting “after a lot of brands and services found merit in associating and benefitting from our knowledge about the kids industry”. They had their first online kids exhibition called ‘Bazaar’ during Diwali 2012 and again in 2013. They have brought out several guides for parents and kids on topics ranging from summer camps to breast feeding.
The best reward for her work is “when moms write to me about how kidsstoppress.com helped them take informed and objective decisions”, says Mansi.