Startup story- Tinystep (parenting platform)

After passing out from IIT Kanpur in 2006, Suhail Abidi joined PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) as a senior consultant. But at some point during the three years with PwC, Abidi realized it wasn’t what he wanted to do in life. “I didn’t feel settled. I was just doing it because others were doing it. There was no higher purpose to it,” he says. He then went to do MBA at Stanford. There he was exposed to the huge potential in entrepreneurship. But he quickly realized that one cant just startup without being close to the problem. “You need to be connected to a particular problem and really have to be persistent to find a solution to it,” he says. That realization came after he started an app development company in Silicon Valley. Within a year of starting it, Abidi ran into problems. “It was difficult connecting with the American customers and understanding their demands,” he says. In 2014, he left the company and returned to India with his wife, and among their priorities was to start a family. But they realized that was not going to be easy. “We saw many of our friends take the plunge without a good enough support system to raise a kid. Many of them were nuclear families. Even finding a good nanny was a three months process,” Abidi says.

And that gave him the idea for his next venture. Keeping their family plans on hold, Abidi started a platform to help parents connect with each other and ask questions and share experiences related to parenting. He called it Tinystep.   

Again, the biggest challenge was to understand his users. “None of us were parents in the team. So we had no means of understanding what parents really wanted,” he says. Another challenge was to get mothers to understand their app features. “Many of them don’t update the app, so rolling out new features also proves to be difficult. Mobile app is a new concept and not everyone knows how to use all features,” he says. It took a strong analytics team and a lot of time to make users become comfortable with the app. To solve the first problem, Abidi got many mothers as advisors on board. Their suggestions proved invaluable. Abidi says it is important to surround yourself with people smarter than you. Having a set of people one can learn from, helps the company grow. “Almost all my team members are younger and smarter than I am. All the decisions are made by them, I am simply the facilitator,” he says.

Tinystep is hoping to become a WhatsApp for parents. It has seen 20,000 apps downloads and has received backing from Flipkart. And it doesn’t work out; Abidi won’t be going back to the corporate world. “I will either join a startup or a smaller organization that is looking to solve a problem,” he says.