[App Fridays] NameMyWorld helps you pick suitable names for your newborns

'I am not a number, I am a free man'

-The Prisoner, 1967 TV series

One possible reason why members of armies all over the world sometimes feel lonely and disheartened could be that their identity, their name is taken away from them temporarily during training periods and replaced by a number to introduce discipline and remove any preconceived biases.

A name is the first and most cherished gift that our parents bless us with. More often than not the name reflects an individual's personality. Hand over a pen and paper to a person and the first thing over 90% of them would scribble down is their name. Remembering and getting a person's name right, immediately breaks the ice and puts the other person at ease, it shows that you do recognize that individual and value him or her.

Picking out the most suitable name for a new born is an extremely difficult and tiring process for most parents. Keeping this in mind, MindSparx founded by Vijay Khubchandani, developed an app titled 'NameMyWorld' to help parents pick out suitable names for their newborns all at the click of a button.

What is it about?:

NameMyWorld is an app that helps parents name their baby. It uses the principles of numerology to determine if a particular name will be suitable for the baby, and whether it is in sync with the baby’s date of birth or not. It is calculated by a unique algorithm in the app, which returns a percentage score for every name that parents wish to evaluate.

So parents, who are in the middle of naming their baby, can download the app for free and create a profile for themselves and their newborn. They are then required to punch in the names that they are considering for the baby to get the percentage score out of 100, and choose the one they like most out of the top names. To assist parents further with the selection, the app also provides a verdict like Best, Good, Average and Critical for different score ranges.

Check out their video to know more:

The Guy Behind it

Vijay Khubchandani is a seasoned Entrepreneur who started his first venture, a mortgage loan consultancy firm in Mumbai, in the year 2005. Within 3 years, he clocked a turnover of 100 crores in gross loan disbursals at Citibank N.A., and broke all earlier records set by his predecessors. Then in 2011, after getting bored of the same daily routine for the past 6 years, coupled with a desire to venture into the online digital space, he took his business online and founded MoneyLeo.com for online loan comparison and application in India. MoneyLeo garnered some rave reviews from the startup community, and it also went on to finish 2nd at the Smasher Awards held by TiE in Mumbai. NameMyWorld is Vijay's second venture.

Vijay is an ardent follower of Steve Jobs' philosophies about life, design and user experience, and swears by everything Apple. The primary role that he has been playing in his startups, is that of designing the entire UI & UX of the product, over and above the domain expertise. He also operates a meetup group in Mumbai called TheCrazyOnes, where startup founders and wannabe entrepreneurs of tech startups casually meet and try to help each other with some valuable resources and information exchange over tea and coffee.

The story behind the app

Vijay Khubchandani had come across numerology while casually surfing the internet in 2008, and started reading books to explore this science further as a hobby. Slowly the subject began surprising him with its amazing accuracy, and he was intrigued to dig deeper and study it in more detail. Then after 4 years of studying and experimenting with the science over weekends and holidays, he quietly kept the acquired knowledge aside as a treasured reference.

Then one day in late 2011, his friend’s wife gave birth to a baby girl after battling a lot of difficulties and complications. And the parents just couldn’t believe that their months of ordeal were finally over. But when it came to naming their new found lease of life, the parent’s approach was pretty casual and carefree. They shortlisted names which were either uncommon, unique or simply in trend at that time.

Being a witness of this process, and unable to withstand the fact that the baby was a fighter and deserved a suitable name to start its new journey, he politely intervened and offered his help in highlighting the suitableness and unsuitableness of the names that were being considered. The parents were overwhelmed with this gesture and readily agreed to evaluate names based on the parameters of numerology as they too wanted the best for their baby.

Over the next few days that followed, not only did the parents finalize a name as per his recommendations, but also got him thinking hard about similar situations faced by millions of parents at this important juncture of life. This is when the idea of creating a software product around the concept came to his mind, which would be easily accessible to every parent in all parts of the world.

So after a few months of researching and discussing with other parents, who were also in the process of picking suitable names for their babies, he zeroed in on creating an iPhone App in the middle of 2012 and it went live on the iTunes AppStore on 16th September 2013. He recently released the app on the Google Play store as well on 9th July 2014.

Pricing and availability:

The app is Free to download, but certain additional features require in-app purchases.

Features like Name Interpretation, Compatibility Check and Number Checker are available for free.

When parents create a profile for their newborn baby, they get free Unlimited name choices for evaluating the names they already have in mind, but if they run out of name ideas, there is also a premium ‘Suggest’ feature where the app recommends suitable names for the baby from a vast database of names and origins.

Estimated market size

Everyday around 0.37 million babies are born across the world. Out of which, they estimate around 20% of parents have access to smartphones, giving them 74 thousand prospective customers a day.

With a fixed gross revenue of $5.99 per customer, the potential addressable market size for the app comes to around $162 million per year.

Process involved:

Step 1 – Create your baby’s profile

Start by creating a profile for your newborn baby. Enter the date of birth, preferred last name, preferred middle name, and details of both parents.

Step 2 – Access the name List

Once the profile is created, you get a dedicated ‘Name List’ page for your baby.

Step 3 – Try a few names

Use the ‘Name List’ page for adding the names that you are considering for your baby. The app will return a percentage score about the suitability of that name for your baby, based on the science of numerology.

Step 4 – Get some name suggestions

They also have a ‘Suggest’ feature, which can give name recommendations for your baby from over 50,000 names across 108 different origins. ‘Suggest’ is a premium feature, and needs to be bought and unlocked inside the app.

Step 5 – Shortlist what you like

The ‘Suggest’ feature lines up the top names based on your preferred search parameters in descending order of their respective scores. You can choose to add any of these names to the main ‘Name List’.

Once you have the top name options, you can compare and shortlist the one you like most for your bundle of Joy.

Additional Features

Compatibility

The app has a unique ‘Compatibility Check’ feature, which you can use to check your compatibility score with friends, family, spouse, siblings, bosses, partners and colleagues etc.

Interpretations

The app provides you with loads of detailed interpretations about your name and date of birth. Read them to get a deeper understanding and a greater insight into your personality, and of those around you.

Gallery

The app also has a unique ‘Gallery’ tab, which contains a list of pre-saved profiles of celebrities and other prominent personalities around the world. You can use these profiles just like any other profile, and access features like ‘Interpretations’ and ‘Compatibility Check’ for your favourite celebrity.

Future Plans

Future improvements and new features that the team is working on:

Baby Name Meaning Filter

It will allow parents to filter baby names based on a specific keyword and its meaning, for example ‘Determination’ , ’Honest’ and ‘Fearless’ etc. This will be unique and one of its kind offering.

Birth Date Interpretations

It will enable users to read what the numbers in their date of birth have to say about them. This will be a supplement to the existing ‘Name Interpretation’ feature.

Compatibility Interpretations

It will provide more details on why a particular compatibility is good or bad. Users will be able to unlock them for more serious and important profiles like when they want to check compatibility for marriage or partnerships etc.

Share for more

The app will have options like ‘Tweet for more’ & ‘Share for more’ inside purchases, which will add 3 more name choices for a user on tweeting or sharing about them on their social networking accounts.

Pros and Cons

I tried out the app on both iOS and Android. The app provides a really good experience on both platforms with a sleek user interface and is very easy to use.

The only downside I faced initially was that the app required 29MB of space for Android devices and 55.7MB of storage space on iOS devices. But after playing around with the app for a bit and realizing the extent of detail and the huge database of names and features that the app offers, I felt that the size was justifiable.

YS verdict:

With the app achieving #1 spot in the lifestyle category in India in October 2013 on iOS, the Android app is in the Top 50 New Free Lifestyle apps on the Google Play store now. We can safely say it is a must have app for all expecting parents.

You can download it here on Android and iOS.

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