Parenting in the Digital World: Success Story of Mumsnet
If you have never heard of Mumsnet. It is a UK based online platform founded in March 2000 by Justine Roberts, aiming to make parents’ lives easier. Possible the UK’s biggest online network for parents, the business has generated £8.6 million of revenue in 2018. From blog content for pregnancy, parenting to lifestyles, family product reviews, and a community forum talk about wilder topics such as property or finance. The forum itself is similar to Quora or Reddit in the US, however, with an original target audience.
“Just because you may not look the part, or you may not sound the part, doesn’t mean that you aren’t the best person to do it.” — Justine Roberts, Founder of Mumsnet
Here are the key takeaways:
1. Start from a real problem
Scratch your own itch is where a lot of entrepreneurs started their venture and are proving to be having successes again and again. The founder started the idea to help other parents, from her own terrible family holiday experience with her one-year-old twins.
2. Target audience
Being called Mum’s net, it is targeted at women aged 25–44 and parents so either dad or a mum should find this forum useful. Having a very good understanding of who uses their site, also helps them become an effective channel for marketing to parents. According to Mumsnet, 91% of their users have children.
3. Monetisation opportunities
With 1.2 billion page views per year, the advertising power is substantial. Other ways of monetisation including brand partnership, influencer marketing, and membership. Although basic users are free, you can also upgrade to premium members to remove adverts (£4.99 per month or £49.99 for an annual subscription), which was introduced this year in 2020.
4. Market appetite
If Mumsnet were to crowd into an already filled market, it probably won’t get the success it has today. Rather, by tapping into an often overlooked area, find and fill that gap has definitely contributed to its rise.
5. Authenticity
10 million unique users per month. By having an excellent user base and a healthy community, Mumsnet generates authentic content by users responses in the discussion forums. It also shares the success with social media where the user is the prime content contributor.
6. Media attractions
In many news articles, you can often find journalists use quotes from Mumsnet, which meant it is a very influential community. Because of its visibility in the media, it can potentially bring even more users to the website.
Finally, to learn from the success of Mumsnet we understand starting a successful online business may not require a lot of sources to start with. However, an idea that solves an actual problem and true understanding of the target audience is the key to future success.
