It may seem like the last thing the web needs is another parenting website, but you wouldn’t know that by the impressive growth the new website CircleOfMoms.com chalked up over the past couple of months. The site, launched in October 2008, has already grown to over 850,000 registered users. Seventy-five percent of the users are US-based.
Ok, it’s a bit ridiculous that social networks for every conceivable market demographic exist. But I’m guessing, based on the success of Maya’s Mom (acquired in August 2007 by BabyCenter) and other social sites around parenting, that New York based Totspot could find a profitable niche.
The service, which is built on Ruby on Rails, just entered private beta. They are targeting new mothers who will create profiles for themselves and their babies, and add other mothers/kids as friends. A key part of the service will be recording milestones like the first crawl, steps, solid food, word said, etc. with text, video and photos. Users will then be able to have books printed with all of this material, for an additional fee.
Profile pages for members will not be available to the public. Users can either open them up to all Totspot members, or just their friends.
The company says they have not yet raised any capital but are currently talking to venture capitalists in New York and Silicon Valley. Sign up on their home page to request a beta invitation.
And if you have a baby, let me know if you think you’d use this.
Minti offers a collaborative parenting advice service that ignores the one-to-many we know best style service that is the norm in this space, and instead empowers individuals to share their stories and experience.
As Michael Arrington wrote his initial review of the site in March 2006, the overall concept of Minti isn’t entirely new. As a service it sits somewhere between an advice site such as BabyCentre (a site I visited regularly when I was on the road to parenthood) and a forum. The difference is in the implementation.
Weighing User Generated Interactions
Minti is powered by the Vibe Engine, a custom built CMS owned by Vibe Capital (the majority shareholders of Minti) that also powers sites such as Refurber.
Minti has over 20,000 active registered members (as opposed to inactive or casual visitors, they are doing 7 figures in traffic) who comment, vote, tag, and contribute advice. Consider something like Breastfeeding; Minti has many user generated advice articles on the subject but it’s how they are weighed that makes the service usable and perhaps something different.
The Vibe Engine weighs votes on an article based on a number of factors. Anyone can vote, but an unregistered visitor’s vote is not weighed as heavily as a registered user. Users themselves fall into ten member categories based on the amount of activity the undertake on Minti itself. Each level has a higher weighing meaning that users who are more active have a stronger vote than those who aren’t. It should be noted that none of this is evident to the user; these are all primarily backend levels, although at certain levels users get extra privileges including the ability to mark a contribution for review/ deletion is it is not of a reasonable standard. Users at higher levels also get to vote on reviews/ deletions as well in a truly distributed management model where regular users have ownership in decision making.
Overall the model delivers user rated results that serve to filter lots of information in a more accessible fashion for all readers.
Angel investor and startup advisor Jeff Clavier (pictured with Digg founder Kevin Rose) just announced a new $12 million early stage venture fund today at the TechCrunch40 conference. The new fund will be called SoftTech VC II.
Clavier, who has a degree in computer science, has been actively investing in startups over the last few years and has had notable successes such as Truveo (acquired by AOL for a rumored $50 million), Userplane (acquired by AOL for a rumored $35 million), MyBlogLog (acquired by Yahoo for $10 million), Kaboodle (acquired by Hearst for a rumored $30-40 million), Mayas Mom (acquired by BabyCenter for $7 million), Dogster, Kongregate, Edgeio and many others. In other words, he has an eye for winners. His investment philosophy will remain much the same, he says. He’s just now investing money from limited partners as well as his own capital.
He says he’ll invest the fund in a total of 30 to 40 seed stage startups with investments ranging from $100k – $500k. SoftTech VC will focus on consumer Internet.
Clavier has made four initial investments through the fund: Satisfaction Unlimited, Social Media Network, Grouply (which will launch at the conference today) and Active Athlete.
Palo Alto based Maya’s Mom is a sort of Yahoo Answers plus Facebook, for parents, that we previously announced back in April. The site went live yesterday and already has fairly deep content.
Other companies are addressing the parenting/family social network opportunity as well (we’ve covered Minti, Famster and FriendsForFamilies). But Maya’s Mom is focused on allowing users to request and offer advice to others first, and more traditional social networking features second.
The heart of Maya’s Mom is their “Talk” section. Rather than following the article format of Minti, Maya’s Mom allows you to post about any questions you have publicly, anonymously, or to specific friends. Users can subscribe to the most recent questions via RSS. Questions are grouped by tags and analyzed for duplicates when submitted. You can search for answers by keyword or tag. If someone has already posted a question like yours, Maya’s Mom will direct you toward their answer. Like activities, you can also create list and be alerted when new answers to your questions arrive.
The company boasts a strong group of initial investors from a recent “around $1 million” angel round – True Ventures, Jeff Clavier, James Currier, Caterina Fake, Geoff Ralston, Raymond Stern, and Michael Tanne. The Maya’s Mom blog is here. And if you are wondering about the name of the company – Maya is founder Ann Crady’s daughter. I wonder if Ann’s son Derick will someday feel less loved because the site isn’t named in his honor instead.
Like previously profiled Minti, Palo Alto based Maya’s Mom is going to be a great collaborative/community resource for parenting. The founder, Ann Crady Kennedy, previously a corporate lawyer at Wilson Sonsini and later at Yahoo, has a landing page up to collect emails from interested people. The company is named after Ann’s daughter, Maya.
If you have kids, make sure you sign up.
Interesting fact: Maya’s Mom is now headquartered in Flock’s old offices in downtown Palo alto, along with Dorrian Porter’s hot new mobile startup Mozes.
