Oma

Google a question about early childhood development and you’ll see contradictory, judgmental information that may not even apply to your family. If you even have the time after taking care of a child, going to work, and juggling financial, mental, and societal pressures as a new parent.

We’re creating a filter on all this noise that can deliver personalized, intelligent, high-quality information to new parents on any topic from pregnancy to childbirth to early childhood development.

Oma is a mobile app that anticipates parents’ needs, connects them to local resources, and reminds them of important milestones.

• When is the next pediatrician visit?

• What activities can I do with my two-month old?

• How do I recover after a C-section?

All this is delivered through the persona of Oma, your tech-savvy grandma. She can transform not only parent’s access to information but their mental wellbeing as well.

Factoring in child responsibilities, the average American working mother works 98 hours a week. That’s 2.5 full-time jobs. 90% of those moms feel that they don’t get to spend enough time with their children and feel rushed and stressed. 78% of stay-at-home moms also feel that way.

Even in the best of financial and social circumstances, where is the room for a parent to hunt for information about early childhood development, much less seek out a class outside their home?

Nowhere is the simple answer.

That isn’t to say that parents aren’t interested in promoting their children’s development but rather that the resources that are available aren’t consumable in a way that fits into their daily life.

What’s needed is a simple, fast, relevant, mobile first solution that can reach a parent wherever they are, whenever they need it.

Our goal is to serve all households with children under 5 (~12 million in the US). However, we are starting with new parents with a child under 6 months and focusing on specific communities that our partners currently serve.

Any parent can download our app from the App Store and Google Play. However we will be focusing our personalization efforts and distribution on these specific communities so that we can build out the most complete experience before scaling it to more communities.

We will be focused on resources on childbirth, postpartum mental and physical health, infant milestones in the first 6 months, and finding local parent communities with your interests.

Oma is a mobile app that provides personalized advice, insights and reminders to any parent with a smartphone. This covers everything from when your child’s pediatrician visits are to what type of parent leave is available in your state to what signs of postpartum depression are. In addition, we partner with local services and community groups to connect you to local resources - playgroups, childbirth prep classes, and local mental health professionals. If you need them to be free or on insurance, we can sort by that as well. Oma also sends timely reminders of everything from when you can sit your baby upright in the stroller to when to discuss solid foods with your pediatrician to when to apply to PreK.

Given that more than 90% of American adults between 18-49 have a smartphone, nearly any parent in the US could use this technology.

Existing technology in the parenting space isn’t smart and it isn’t kind. The vast majority is either forums or product-sponsored articles whose only personalization is your child’s age. And the goal of these websites and apps is to keep you continuously searching and clicking on the next article instead of building you up as a parent.

While that has been a profitable model for these businesses, the lack of empathy for parents is increasingly out of touch with modern parenting movements that have been opening up the conversation to more realistic depictions of parenting and the pressures society puts on new parents.

What Oma can do is combine technology understanding with parental empathy and create a product and a brand that parents identify with and trust. 

The user asks Oma questions on our mobile app. Then our AI algorithm (a JS library) creates a personalized profile in our database that targets significant pieces of information (e.g. what kind of delivery did they have? Are they feeling down repeatedly over several days? Do they live in a city or suburb? What brand of stroller do they have?).

This profile informs advice that Oma gives to specific questions but more importantly powers our recommendation system on the server that sends relevant information/questions to the user on a weekly basis via push notification. This allows Oma to truly anticipate the user's needs in a way that a parent on their own may not be able to see.

Parents in our Beta release not only loved the information they got from Oma, they love Oma. They immediately felt an affinity for the character of Oma and felt comfortable asking her questions. 

This showed us that we were connecting with parents in a way that tapped into their experience and in a way that all the other parenting apps they were using weren't doing.

If our vehicle of getting content to new parents is that well-received, then the limits of what we can give to parents is unlimited. And the simplicity of our delivery vehicle means that we can do anything from Preschool eligibility to WIC applications to postpartum mental health checkins without needing to build any new infrastructure.

Current: 100 (beta)

In 1 year: 50,000 to 150,000 (release)

In 5 years: 2,000,000 - 5,000,000 (scaled)

In the next year, we want to make the Oma experience as seamless and magical as possible, as well as proving out our partnership business model.

• Securing 5+ (paying) partners to sponsor specific parenting or pregnancy topics within the app.
• Securing 5+ (paying) content partners to turn their information into intelligent recommendations on Oma.
• Having a 70+ NPS score from a survey of at least 1,000 users.
• 75% of users are WAUs

In five years, we want to expand the number of parents we serve and the number of topics we cover.

• Build a partnerships team with dedicated verticals (e.g. pregnancy, postpartum, infants, toddlers, kindergarten etc).
• Expand our direct to consumer business (with a paid subscription option) to be at least 50% of our users and 50% of our revenue.
• Maintain or exceed our WAU percentage and NPS scores as we scale.

Financial

We are currently bootstrapped which has kept our initial costs low (development, design etc is all done in house). However, as we scale we will have three new expenses:

1. New Team Members (e.g. Sales & Partnerships)
2. Infrastructure (e.g. Servers, Data etc)
3. User Acquisition (for direct to consumer)

Legal

We specifically avoid giving direct medical advice (and reinforce this in our TOS), instead opting to point you towards an expert service where you can get personalized advice. However, as we expand to more and more topics, we run the risk of giving incorrect or incomplete advice.

Financial

We are starting with our partnership monetization path instead of the direct to consumer one because the upfront costs are significantly less. Not only will we not need a user acquisition budget, we will scale our infrastructure more slowly to keep costs down. Eventually, we expect our business to be split 50/50 between consumer and partnerships and this may necessitate raising VC to finance the consumer side. However we plan to hold off that decision for at least a year because of our decision to focus on partnerships first.

Legal

To proactively address any possible miscommunication of complex or controversial topics, we are beginning to form an expert advisory panel on childbirth, postpartum, pediatrics etc.  This gives us a clear decision-making structure when we encounter a topic that needs more nuance. And we can provide disclaimers or warnings on any areas that could have a possible misunderstanding. This will also have an added benefit of giving us a higher profile when approaching new partners.

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Sophia Bender-Koning, Founder and CEO

Kerin Perez-Harwood, Part-Time Childbirth & Postpartum Consultant

Justine Leach, Part-Time Childbirth & Postpartum Consultant

I've built consumer mobile experiences that millions of students and teachers adore. I've been a product manager at a 5 person startup who had to jump between engineering, design, marketing, and customer support. And I've managed teams at 50 and 100+ person startups.

I'm also a new mom to Noa, 18 months. I've struggled with Postpartum Anxiety. I've had trouble finding a tribe of parents who I can identify with (Entrepreneurs who also take care of their kids part-time). And I've been disappointed with parenting technology that doesn't get me or really help me at all.

I'm at a unique position of understanding both the technical and emotional side of building an app like this. And I've been able to immerse myself in a wide variety of parenting, prenatal, and postpartum groups to build an inclusive platform that speaks to all different types of parents like they wish their grandma would.

We're currently partnering with two childbirth and postpartum experts (Resilient Birth and Your Support Her) to develop our content and personalize what is relevant to what type of parent.

And we're in the process of partnering with 5+ other organizations in that space.

Direct To Consumer

Any parent can download our app and sign up for a premium subscription, which includes additional topics and personalizations. This offering will be priced at $2.99 / mo.

Platform Partners

Any brand or company can become a partner in order to purchase discounted groups of premium subscriptions for the parents they work with or sponsor a topic in the app. Discounted subscriptions will $18 / year with a minimum of 10 subscriptions. Topic sponsorships start at $10,000 (which includes 500 premium subscriptions). A sponsored topic highlight the associated brand but not customize content or sell ads for specific products (e.g. "Infant Milestones are sponsored by Huggies"). 

Content Collaborator Partners

In addition groups of premium subscriptions and topic sponsorships, we offer non-profits, experts, and governments collaborative partnerships with "Smart Content Services." This is a custom consultation with the organization about their current content where we develop a plan to transform it into intelligent content that can be consumed by the Oma app. This means figuring out what types of push notifications they want to send and to who, what interactive visualizations they want, or what types of users they want to flag for different risk factors. These would be priced on a custom basis based on the amount of content and personalization they want.

Our highest costs are user acquisition and infrastructure as we scale. Because of this, we do not plan to heavily invest in the direct-consumer market until we can be profitable on the partnership model, which we expect to do by the end of 2020. From there, depending on the paid subscription rate and infrastructure costs, we can either continue to scale or raise venture capital from a profitable stance to scale to the millions of users we intend to have within 5 years.

We've built an awesome mobile app that parents love and a powerful content creation platform that can easily expand to any parenting topic. 

To get to our intended level of impact, we need to connect with the right set of partners who understand our point of view and have the potential to scale our platform to millions of parents and tens of thousands of topics.

Solve would help us do this both with the funding to support our efforts and the platform to gain new partners.

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Examples of Organizations we'd love to partner with:

Prenatal / Maternal Health Organizations

• March of Moms
• Planned Parenthood

Postpartum Organizations

• Postpartum Health Alliance
• Maternal Mental Health Now

Infant Health / Pediatrics

• March of Dimes
• American Academy of Pediatrics

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Do you know what the best evidence that Silicon Valley's technology is fueled by men who don't have families? The fact that Oma doesn't exist yet.

Just think. It's beloved by every new mom who tries it (and most say they'd pay for it). And yet in the multi-billion dollar baby industry, no one's suggested that new moms deserve top quality, modern technology that makes them feel better about themselves as parents.

To me this speaks to the fact that not only are there not enough new moms in the technology world but that the people there just fundamentally aren't listening to them when they create products.

Our company intends to fix both of these problems in a way that speaks to parents and new moms in particular. We want to see them as human beings. And we want celebrate each mother as her own person, bringing in experts from a diverse set of communities to help us speak to each and every mother in a way that's right for them.

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