Invasion of the mommy sites — Maya’s Mom launches with angel funding

October 27, 2006 | Matt Marshall | Comments |

updated

mayas-mom.bmpMaya’s Mom, a start-up based in a Palo Alto garage, has launched the latest site for parents to trade tips about how to care for their kids.

There are numerous other sites doing very similar things. Minti.com launched last year, and got $1.19M in venture capital earlier this year. It appears to have stolen an early lead, and has found all kinds of ways to integrate with other popular Internet sites. There’s Mommybuzz, which is very difficult to look at because its color is jarring, and requests an immediate login.

Maya’s Mom is one of two Silicon Valley newcomers. The other is San Francisco’s MothersClick, which emerged this month, founded by a first-time mom. They’ve both decided to focus on what they see as the three main features popular among parental advice sites.

These are: (1) A forum for questions and commentary from parents, which is the Maya’s Moms’ central feature, (2) a listing of kids activities, and (3) a place to look up “groups”

The main difference between these two is on the homepage. Maya’s Mom presents you with its main features from the outset. It is open, without registration required. MothersClick, meanwhile, requires you to register, and requests you to choose a geographical area before you select a group. It is too early to tell whether these extra steps will help or hamper MothersClick — since some will presumably like the registration requirement, and others won’t.

We talked with Maya’s Mom founder and chief executive Ann Crady a few days ago. She just finished raising an angel round yesterday from a group including Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake, Yahoo exec Jeff Ralston, Tickle founder James Currier, Presto’s Raymond Stern, Wink’s Michael Tanne, angel investor Jeff Clavier and True Ventures.

She describes it as a cross between Yahoo Answers and Facebook. It is centered around the asking and answering of questions related to parenting. Lower on the site, it lists kids’ activities. If it can guess your location, or if you give your location to the site, it will show you activities in your region. Right now, its strength is in the Bay Area, and it plans to build from there.

While generally open to anyone, it does give parents the option of sending questions privately to trusted friends.

mayasmompic2.bmpInvestor Jeff Clavier said he invested in the site because, like his other investment in Dogster, it has the potential to be a “passion centric community” site. He calls it the “Dogster for moms.”

Crady previously ran business development at Yahoo’s Search and Marketplace Group, and before that was at 1stUp. She was also a corporate securities lawyer at Wilson Sonsini. She has a daughter named Maya (they are pictured above), and she is a member of various parental groups in the Bay area.

A partial screenshot of the homepage is below:
screenshotmaya.bmp

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Matt Marshall is editor and CEO of VentureBeat. Follow him on Twitter at @mmarshall, and follow VentureBeat on Twitter at @venturebeat.

  • I'm part of a small startup that recently launched a site for moms (and dads) too, called Pongyow.

    It’s a family-centric photo/movie/blog hosting site with some of the requisite social networking stuff built in, including access controls and collaboration. We’re targeting moms and dads with family photos, movies, etc., who want to put together a nice-looking site to share their stuff with friends and family.

    If you’re a parent wondering what to do with all your photos, check us out!
    http://www.pongyow.com
  • Matt, thank you for recognizing the recent launch of MothersClick. We're very proud of the press we've received so far. (http://www.mothersclick.com/press_news)

    A few points for clarification:

    We're not another social network for parents. Instead, we're designed *exclusively* for moms, and we're the first site to focus on providing services for mothers groups, both new and existing. Pete Cashmore at Mashable also talks about this differention.

    In regards to your good question about our process requiring user registration and identifying geographical area, the answer is two-fold.

    First, before developing MothersClick, I did extensive research into mothers groups and found that security is paramount, a major and ubiquitious issue for all moms.

    MothersClick requires registration and verification by email to avoid spammers and, primarily, to validate every users' contact information. If an email is bogus, you don't get on. Because we take our users' privacy very seriously, these basic steps are for the benefit of all our members.

    Secondly, we introduced the world's first geo-mapping system for mothers groups, a powerful yet easy way for locating groups by zip code.

    In order to start a group, a mom simply provides her zip code when registering it, and we put her group on the map! Since the goal of MothersClick is to create a global community for all moms to connect and share knowledge, it's an important and very valuable feature.

    Thanks again for your coverage and there's more exciting developments for to come!
  • Congratulations to Ann for launching Maya's Mom, I was starting to think it would never happen since reading about it on TechCrunch months ago.

    Matt - thanks for linking to Minti, much appreciated.

    A slight correction in your post above, we received Angel funding, not Venture Capital.

    In regards to Q&A for parents, Minti has a Q&A section which is very popular with our members.

    -- Clay
    Minti Co-Founder
  • Cathy Bradford
    Maya's Mom is a "Dogster for Moms"?

    LOL.

    Did Clavier really say that? Good grief, get that man away from the microphone. No more chardonnay.

    Who's going to do the PR?
  • AJ
    anyone seen this site?
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