In Bangladesh with a population of 160 million, about 10,000 children are born every day, half of which are the first child of the family. Moreover, as the number of nuclear families continues to grow in the country, parents are terrified of everything during their first pregnancy. In addition, about 20 million families in the country have children between the ages of 0 and 5 years, who need a lot of support from their parents in their daily upbringing. Moreover, in families where both parents are employed, it becomes very difficult for parents to take care of the child. As a result, the need for daycare or a nanny was created. ToguMogu, the first parenting app in Bangladesh, is working to solve such problems. The platform also offers a variety of parenting guides and services for first-time pregnant parents as well as parents who have children aged 0-5 years. The company started its journey in 2016 and currently has 20 employees and more than 1 lakh registered users of the platform.
Journey
The idea of establishing ToguMogu came in 2016. Earlier, the founders of the company were working together in another venture called “Light of Hope”. At that time their friend Nasimul Islam Maruf and his wife Anika Rahman Mau became the new parents. However, due to being a nuclear family, the Maruf-Anika couple as new parents had a lot of trouble maintaining everything alone. Besides, it was not possible to get support from family as their parents were out of Dhaka. On the other hand, there is a lot of doubt about the authenticity of parental support-related content that is available on the Internet. Nazmul Arefin Momel, Nasimul Islam Maruf, Zillul Karim Sunny, and Waliuallah Bhuiyan, who have already worked with children in such a situation, plan a platform to support working parents in a nuclear family like Maruf – Anika.
Dr. Nazmul Arefin, Co-founder and CEO of ToguMogu stated, “When our friends started to become a parent, we started thinking about working with parenting. Especially when my friend Maruf and Anika became parents for the first time, we realized what problems a working parent faces every day and tried to come up with solutions to help them.”
That’s where the idea for the ToguMogu platform comes from. Based on this idea, from the very beginning of the pregnancy period of new working parents to the age of 5 years after the birth of the child, they used to provide various parenting-related content by drawing blogs about the problems that parents may face for taking care.
In 2017, ToguMogu was officially registered as a company. While parents can learn a lot from the blogs on ToguMogu’s website, there is confusion when it comes to choosing a brand to buy diapers, feeders, or toys for babies. With this in mind, e-commerce was added to ToguMogu’s website in 2018. Where a variety of newborn baby products recommended by experts for new parents are included. That same year, ToguMogu launched a photography service called Baby Pixel to capture various memories of newly pregnant parents and Newborn babies. In addition to these services, in 2019 the platform began connecting nanny, day-care, pre-school, after-school, and special care center service providers for working parents with their platform.
Since ToguMogu is a completely new platform for Bangladeshi parents, initially onboarding users and educating them about the services became quite challenging for the platform.
Dr. Nazmul Arefin also said, “When we started working, the Parenting app Idea was completely new in Bangladesh and work experience in such a project was very hard to find. So, in the first stage, it was very difficult for us to identify the needs of the Parents of Bangladesh and bring the content and services together accordingly and serve them. But in the last four-five years, we have been able to capture that challenge.”
However, this scenario began to change in the early days of the Pandemic, and new users began to join the platform. ToguMogu’s website launched a beta version of a mobile app for the platform in October 2020 as the number of customers and users continued to grow. Starting with the website and mobile app, in-house developers are in charge of the design and development of the platform. Subsequently, the final version of the ToguMogu Parenting App was launched in April 2021. So far, the app has been downloaded about 1 lakh times from Google Play Store and App Store. Moreover, the number of registered users of the platform, including websites and mobile apps, has now exceeded 1 lakh. Any parent can now use the Togumgu app by downloading it from Google Play Store or App Store.
In addition to serving customers at the individual level, ToguMogu is also providing B2B services at the industrial level. Since the platform is conducting its activities to provide parenting support to working parents in mind, it is focusing on supporting working parents by creating collaboration with their workplace. ToguMogu is currently working in a corporate partnership with Walton and Bengal Group. In addition, in collaboration with BRAC and the H&M Foundation, the platform is working with garment factories across the country. In addition to educating garment workers on parenting and balancing their work life, ToguMogu is providing health and wealth-related education to their children. Garment workers even get discounts on purchasing any product or service from the platform.
In January 2021, the platform collected 60,000 in funds from Bangladesh Angels in the Angel Round, and they are currently preparing for seed round funding.
Operation
Parenting Contents
Couples who become parents for the First-time have a lot of concerns and questions about pregnancy and the baby. Since it is not always possible to go to the doctor for all the advice, most new parents consume various blogs and content related to pregnancy online. However, since most of the content is in English, many parents in the country do not understand everything properly. To solve this problem, ToguMogu publishes a variety of educational content on its website on pregnancy and parenting in Bengali. These blogs cover issues ranging from parental pregnancy, childbirth, child development, etc. The ToguMogu App has a full growth tracking feature that allows you to easily get regular health and growth content for mother and baby every week.
ToguMogu E-commerce Shop
Through the platform’s e-commerce platform, it offers a variety of products for babies and mothers along with newborns. These products range from diapers to baby food, feeders, lotions, books, a variety of toys, crafts, and drawing items. Tagumgu’s corporate partners get special discounts on shopping, including free delivery. Currently, the platform has more than 1,500 different SKU products. ToguMogu sources all kinds of products directly from domestic manufacturers and from authorized vendors of foreign brands.
Day Care & Pre-School
ToguMogu has more than 500 daycare, preschool, and after-school services, play zones, and special care institutions across the country. In this case, the platform follows the marketplace model. In this way, when a user requests such services, ToguMogu allows the user to connect with such service providers through their pps. As a result, working parents can select daycare or preschool for their children using ToguMogu’s online platform. In addition to Nanny Service Provider, Parenting Course, and Kids Course-related 10 more organizations are associated with the platform.
Doctor Search & Booking Service
The period from the pregnancy period or until the baby is 5 years old is quite critical for both mother and baby and requires regular consultation with the doctor on baby development and other matters. Through a strategic partnership with DoctorOla, Doctor Search & Booking Service has been incorporated into the ToguMogu platform, to ensure that parents receive the necessary medical care at the right time. Through which ToguMogu connects the user directly with DoctorOla if any user of the platform needs a doctor’s advice. Also, any user can purchase DoctorOla’s various health packages directly from the Togumgu app.
Baby Photography Service
Over the past few years, the trend of capturing the beautiful moments of parents with their Newborn Baby through photography has started. ToguMogu has come up with this service for parents keeping in mind this trend. Through the Baby Pixels brand, ToguMogu offers this service through professional photographers and art directors in its own studio. ToguMogu is constantly bringing new features and services in their app which is making the life of working parents in Bangladesh easy and worry-free and making parenting enjoyable. On the other hand, small and large companies in Bangladesh are also able to focus on the family health and well-being of their employees through partnerships with ToguMogu. Which in turn is helping these employees to be productive in the workplace.
Future Plan
Regarding the goal for the next 5 years, Dr. Nazmul Arefin shared, “If I say the next 5 years of the target, the daycare industry and the parenting-related help services of Bangladesh are brought together and introduce the Parents to our service more so that they can easily get these services. We want to bring about 1 lakh parents to our service within the next five years.”
In addition, the country is preparing to serve people of all levels and all incomes and is working to make the daycare culture more popular in Bangladesh. According to the CEO of ToguMogu, “About 3 million children are born every year in Bangladesh. The childcare and product-related market size are about $14 billion. Because of being a populated country, the parenting market of Bangladesh is very large and constantly expanding. So there are enormous opportunities, which aren’t yet explored. So we are hopeful that a lot of things can be done in this market.”
Although the platform aims to serve the country by 2025, plans to serve globally by 2030 are also part of ToguMogu’s long-term goal.
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