Talkative Parents makes social network niche segment

One might have heard of social networks like Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, but Talkative Parents makes social networking a niche concept.

The company, launched in 2014, is the first-ever parental social network. Started by Mahesh Vorkady, who is also its CEO, Talkative Parents aims at providing a secure, relevant and useful platform for the right group of parents to interact with each other.

Through this app, parents can be a part of their child’s class and chat on a group or communicate peer-to-peer with other parents. The communication can be within the class group or they can interact with parents of the entire school through the ‘sounding board’, which will be launched in future.

Talkative parents allows parents to pool resources, share information and discuss topics that are relevant to the child’s class. The app can be accessed across all devices at any time and anywhere.

“We are a B2B/B2C platform focusing mainly on communication between all the stakeholders of the schooling/parenting ecosystem, which currently is quite unorganised and scattered,” says Vorkady, adding that two main stakeholders for them are parents and schools.

“We also strongly believe that there is serious need for the highly-sensitive ‘schooling-parenting’ sector to stay away from frivolous social media platforms, and to communicate and stay connected on a safer and secure, and not to mention, exclusive, focused and dedicated platform,” Vorkady adds.

The company has 10 full-time people working with it, which includes engineers, server architects, business development team, etc. and three part time engineers.

“This is a very crowded space and we have managed to (in a small way) carve a niche for ourselves in this space, however, even WhatsApp and Facebook are our indirect competitors. We have done a very small amount of disruption so far, and are still at the very beginning of our journey. We will be much more disruptive as we go along. Competitors will only help us get better,” opines Vorkady, on competition faced by his firm.

So far, the company has raised about $200,000 in funding and are in talks to raise another round soon, according to Vorkady.

“With more funds, we want to expand into other markets within India, and also look at growing markets like Sri Lanka, Africa, Middle East, and other bigger markets like Australia, the US, and the UK, would be under consideration in the next 18-24 months. We want to expand our product offering and our technology team and our business development team soon,” adds Vorkady, on the expansion plan.