Out of a sheer lack of parenting information for new mums, Baby Destination was born

Baby Destination, co-founded by Tamanna Dhamija, is a digital community for pregnant women and new mums to learn and share their parenting experiences and recommendations with other mums.

They say, when a baby is born, a mother is born. True. If there is one thing that all new mothers agree on, it is how overwhelming the whole experience of bringing a new life into this world and taking care of it is.

Earlier, there were joint families where the new mum got support from and the elder women were always ready to chip in with their wisdom. That often eased the young mother’s burden of having to do everything on her own.

Things have clearly changed. The families have gotten smaller and a new mum is often in charge of her baby all by herself. In these times of digitisation, who does she turn to for some advice? The internet, of course.

That’s where an app like Baby Destination scores. Baby Destination is a digital community for pregnant and new mums who come to learn and share their parenting experiences and recommendations with other mums.

Whether you want to know what to expect during pregnancy, or you want to learn about breastfeeding, diapering, feeding for your little one, Baby Destination, founded by Tamanna and Tarun Dhamija in 2016, has the answers.

The idea of Baby Destination sprung from Tamanna’s own experience as a new mother when she had Trishan, a three-year-old now. “We envisioned Baby Destination based on the issues I personally faced as a first-time mum and the power I felt in the collective wisdom of mums therein. We wanted to create an impact in this space, given the lack of credible parenting information around us, even in this era of uber-connected technology proliferation,” says Tamanna.

Tamanna says she had an inclination that other mums, like herself, were at a loss for information when it came to taking care of their little ones. “Tarun and I realised the need for a platform that is technology enabled and facilitates a much more seamless journey across content, products, and community in terms of parenting,” she says.

Both Tarun and Tamanna were working in the US then. When they realised the need for such an app is more in India, they quit their long-standing, successful corporate careers in New York and packed their bags to move to India to build a solution that would impact millions of mums.

Delhi born and bred, Tamanna did her MBA from MDI, Gurgaon, and married Tarun Dhamija in the year 2008, and thereafter settled in the US with him. She was an equities portfolio manager with GM Asset Management, a company that manages one of the largest corporate pension portfolios, and was selected for Harvard’s Emerging leadership programme while working there.

In 2014, she founded a US-based non-profit organisation DFYUSA that has helped over 160 underprivileged children get treatment for congenital heart diseases. A CFA charter holder, she loves to cook and dance when not working.

Tamanna adds that since the beginning, Baby Destination’s focus has been largely on product discovery. “My personal experience is that contemporary parents are the best experts when it comes to parenting, as they give trusted reviews, recommendations, and opinions, which matter a lot when mums make product decisions for their little ones,” she says.

It is no exaggeration when we say that this online space is really catching on with new parents. “As of now, we are engaging over 3.5 million mums every month on Facebook through our content, and have over 3,500 active mums on our WhatsApp groups. Our website gets close to 250,000 monthly active visitors,” says Tamanna. She adds that all this traction has been done organically without spending any money on marketing. “In July last year, we launched a first-of-its-kind Facebook chatbot to interact further with users and learn their behaviour through machine learning and, at the same time, provide them automated content,” she says.

The growth of Baby Destination reflects on the revenue it garners. After it was founded in 2016, Baby Destination bootstrapped for a year. Last year, however, they raised Rs two crore funding to scale up marketing and tech development. “On the whole, Baby Destination has seen significant organic growth over the last 10 months, with an average of 50 percent ‘mum growth’ on the website visits,” Tamanna says proudly.

But what is a typical discussion on Baby Destination like? Tamanna says all sorts of questions related to pregnancy, child care, baby products and mother care have already been discussed over the platform. “We create relevant content to answer the same questions in a systematic manner. In a few years we will become the Wikipedia of parenting and child care,” she says confidently.

And if anyone is feeling miffed about the fact that the online community is ignoring fathers putting the burden of parenting solely on mothers, Tamanna is quick to set the perception right. They are not ignoring fathers, she says. “Mum and dad both have an equal role to play in parenting. In some cases, dads are playing a bigger role when they come forward to support a mum to come out of postnatal depression.

Today’s dads don’t shy away from changing the diapers and bottle feeding a child when mum is resting,” she agrees and adds that that’s the reason why they often create content like ‘how dads can help new mum in feeding’ and ‘how a father can make a bond with his baby’.

Well, all new parents, what are you waiting for now?