How a pregnancy app made it into Facebook’s startup program

Photo credit: Michelle Tribe.

By week 4, she is as big as a poppy seed. By week 5, she is like a lentil. By week 7, she has bloomed into a raspberry. Who is she? For those who haven’t guessed already, she is the baby in the womb.

Ok now, what’s a Mombie? (I’ll give you a hint – it is what I turn into in the dark hours.) Well, nothing scary. It’s just what you call an exhausted mommy who is staying up late because she is craving kid-free time.

Frankly, I have felt like a Mombie almost every single day since my kids were born. So it was with amusement and a sense of solidarity that I discovered the term on Healofy, a pregnancy and babycare app that I recently downloaded on my phone.

Going by the content, you may never guess that the two co-founders of Healofy are both very young and both men.

The peer-to-peer platform is building an online community of moms, expectant parents, and doctors by letting them interact freely around the theme of pregnancy and parenting.

Moms, especially, can be a huge source of support for each other at a time when traditional joint families have disappeared in cities, pretty much leaving pregnant and new mothers to cope with biological and emotional changes on their own.

Going by the deeply personal and sometimes anxious questions mommies shoot on Healofy, the startup has its finger on their pulse. It has garnered 600 daily active users in just a few months. It was recently chosen by Facebook for the FbStart program, which helps early stage mobile startups build and grow their apps.

Going strictly by the content, though, you may never guess that the two co-founders of Healofy are both very young and both men.

Two men and Mombies

Healofy co-founders Shubham Maheshwari and Gaurav Aggarwal.

Gaurav Aggarwal is a 2015 batch IIT graduate who worked at GoZoomo. Shubham Maheshwari is a computer science graduate who worked on Flipkart’s seller-side fraud detection platform. The two school friends teamed up for the medical consultation app Ozone last year.

While the startup wasn’t able to attract enough patients, perhaps because it was a paid service, the experience taught them how to do things right next time – they would have to focus more on the team, culture, product design, and positioning.

‘Next time’ happened with Healofy in May this year.

That crazy business of parenting