An Atlanta company has developed an online service to help parents get better organized.
KidsLink is a virtual filing cabinet for important family documents, events and milestones.
“It’s an app to simplify mom’s world,” CEO Chris Morocco said.
Through the KidsLink app, a parent can import, aggregate and share documents, such as birth certificates, immunization records, report cards and physical consent forms on a smartphone, tablet or desktop. Parents can also store photos of milestones, such as birthdays or first steps — and display it as a timeline that can be shared on Facebook or other social networks.
The app also provides parents with seasonal and developmental alerts, such as immunization checks, regular wellness checks and public health alerts, said Morocco, former CEO of Petrus Brands, holding company for Shane’s Rib Shack and Planet Smoothie brands.
Services like KidsLink are seeing demand from overworked parents struggling to manage the growing load of their children’s extracurricular activities. The online service also taps parents’ need for on-the-go access to important documents.
While there are several online storage services, such as Dropbox, where consumers can store and share documents and photos, KidsLink is structured and organized for parents. The app has pre-defined folders for document categories, such as school, activities and health.
Parents can create separate folders for individual children and a common folder for the entire family.
KidsLink has raised $1.25 million from Atlanta-based BLH Venture Partners and Doug Curling, former president and chief operating officer of ChoicePoint Inc. In 2008, Reed Elsevier, parent of LexisNexis, acquired ChoicePoint for $4.1 billion. KidsLink will invest the capital in product development and sales and marketing.
Growth strategy
Launched in September, KidsLink employs about 13.
The idea for the startup came from co-founder Scott Powers, who was doing badging, credentialing and registration for Sunday school children. Powers teamed up with Joey Katzen, a co-founder of Atlanta software firm Vendormate.
“Vendormate manages information of sales reps,” Morocco said. “KidsLink manages information on children.”
KidsLink’s value proposition was evident to serial entrepreneur Reggie Bradford, who sits on the startup’s advisory board.
Being able to manage the kids’ activities and health and school records is a “huge frustration,” said Bradford, a father of six children.
“We constantly have to re-enter data...it’s a huge time-sink,” Bradford said.
KidsLink’s mobile-centric platform gels with the broader consumer shift toward social and mobile technologies.
“The mobile [device] is going to the first screen for consumers [versus PC or TV], not the second screen,” said Bradford, who sold his social media technology firm Vitrue to Oracle last year for a reported $330 million.
Even though KidsLink is addressing a big problem, building customer adoption will be a challenge for the consumer-facing startup, said Bradford, who was chief marketing officer at WebMD when the company first launched 15 years ago.
“It’s a lot easier to build business-to-business (B2B) enterprise software,” he said.
KidsLink’s monetization strategy involves striking partnerships with health systems, retailers and consumer products companies, which also serve as distribution channels.
KidsLink is striking sponsorships with school systems, hospitals, pediatricians and OB/GYNs who can offer the storage service to parents and patients.
The company’s first partner is Charlotte-based Piedmont Medical Center, a Tenet Healthcare hospital.
“We want to align with organizations that moms trust,” Morocco said.
For health-care providers, who pay an annual subscription fee for the service, KidsLink provides a value-added service for their patients. It’s also a branding opportunity.
Atlanta hospital executive Matt Gove sees a service like KidsLink as an attractive marketing opportunity.
“If you can aggregate moms who are the health-care decision-makers for their families, that I can reach easily, it makes a lot of sense,” said Gove, chief marketing officer of Atlanta-based Piedmont Healthcare (which has no connection with Piedmont Medical Center). “I see it as a great vehicle for Piedmont to be advertising to moms.”
KidsLink’s success in gaining traction with advertisers and sponsors, however, will hinge on the startup’s ability to get a critical mass of parents using the service.
Some hospitals and physician groups already provide online medical record-keeping and sharing services to their patients that KidsLink offers, Gove said.
KidsLink has a wellness component — it sends notifications about annual checkups — which is attractive to health systems.
Under health-care reform, hospitals are incentivized to promote preventive care, which reduces overall health-care costs.
KidsLink is also in preliminary discussions with consumer goods companies and retailers who hope to target parents.
“Mom is the most coveted relationship for any advertiser,” Morocco said. “Moms influence 85 percent of all consumer purchase decisions.”