Smile Mom

I was advising a 'yplan for families' startup and even with their super crappy MVP there was a lot of demand - even a 6 figure M&A offer. Definitively high engagement from core users.

Although clearly not a mother myself, this idea resonated with me a lot. I know my mum used to exchange my clothes with other mothers and organise get togethers with kids of a similar age, many of whom I'm still great friends with. Taking this online seems like a natural progression meaning mothers can connect outside organised play groups or chatting at the park. Only slight problem I have is this solely caters for mothers, I can see something like this being equally useful for fathers too (though the company make family apps so maybe a dad app is in the pipeline - why not make them one and the same?). http://www.producthunt.com/posts... is also interesting though more global than local and seems to be more suited to advice.

Sounds like a great niche idea @_jamesmundy. Would be interesting to hear from the founders on how they plan to raise awareness with their specific target audience. Regarding your problem on whether to have a separate app for dads vs. having it within your existing app, this is an incredibly interesting choice and would love to know what they end up doing. I raised a similar idea on the Path Talk discussion yesterday, on whether the trend towards decoupling an app's features into standalone apps is the right way or building up one and concentrating on just that so as not to lose focus. How focused does an app need to be, and when companies pursue related diversification is it better to integrate new features or launch as standalone products?

@syedaliahmed I agree - that question has been asked so often recently since Facebook and Foursquare started doing it. Can't seem to find their founders on Twitter though.

Adding founder @doshkim to convo. Great team and great product. My wife has been using it for some time now and loving it (we have two young children).

Hey guys, I'm one of the co-founders and CEO of Smile Mom. Thanks for getting us listed on Product Hunt! This is really exciting! Being new parents ourselves, we started this idea to help ourselves & our wives. After going through a lot with our first child (we have two young kids now), especially when my wife (who used to work) became a stay-at-home mom, I really wanted to help her find the right moms to connect with, and discover a good source of parenting information in our local area (e.g. good doctor, nurseries, weekend events, etc.) -- on a mobile device. + In terms of focus, we did begin as a app for both moms and dads, but our data showed that the moms were a bit more social (in terms of # of comments, # of new friends, etc.) on our app, so we started to put more focus on moms. We do have plans to expand our network to rest of the family members (with slightly different angles for each 'category'), but we're focusing on moms first for now. Btw, we're seeing our users grow in major cities in US and London.

@doshkim focussing on mums does make a lot of sense, there are still far more stay-at-home mums than dads despite the growing trend. Better to have focus initially. Really can see this taking off - hope to bump into you in London some time!