KinderPass, a pediatric behavioral health company with mission to help each child thrive.
Shireen Sultana is the Co-founder of KinderPass, a digital child healthcare platform talked to FounderLabs on her journey at KinderPass and her vision for the company’s future.
Excerpts of her interview.
First of all, I would like to Congratulate you to get the funding for the KinderPass.
Thanks so much.
How did KinderPass start its journey?
My co-founder and I founded KinderPass in 2018 as a subscription-based activities platform. We are a Singapore-based company, and my co-founder lives there. We were roommates in B-school and have been close friends for more than 20 years and used to converse about a variety of topics.
However, after we both became parents, our conversations changed to parenting and its issues. We used to talk about the difficulties of raising children, as well as information about children’s health, well-being, and other health issues. We created KinderPass as a tool for parents to help them choose the appropriate knowledge and resources for their child’s growth and development.
What were the key features of KinderPass in its initial days?
We wanted the app to be a companion app to developmental products in 2018-19. We began with aKickstarter campaign for a toy we designed. So, this was a rigorous 4–5-month period of toy design – meeting stringent toy safety standards in the US and Europe, to make developmentally appropriate toys and products for children.
That’s how we began. We hoped to start with roughly 15- 20 products and the app as a companion app. Imagine it as a fitness app that suggests exercises and diets, recommends products that you can use and gives you the option to buy them, to use an analogy.
That’s what we were attempting with child development, where you say, “Accomplish this with your baby,” and then list the items you can use to do these activities with your kid.
What impact did the pandemic have on your company, and how did you handle it?
Unfortunately, the pandemic struck us all, and our lives have changed as a result. At KinderPass, we had a tough time in the initial days because we couldn’t make prototypes, build or test any of our products. Everything had come to a halt.
That’s when we had to make a conscious decision to switch our model. But at the heart of the matter were two mothers. We were looking for the best tools for raising children because we both enjoy reading and researching. My Montessori and neuroscience experience, as well as my co-founder’s background from a family of doctors, helped us a lot in pivoting our product.
How has the pandemic altered both your company’s outlook and that of the parents who used your platform?
The pandemic also presented an unexpected opportunity. The rate of digital adoption and acceptance had suddenly accelerated!
We were assisting parents. So, during the pandemic, we focused on online learning. We assisted parents with parenting courses and helped children with lessons. We were assisting children who were having difficulty learning.
We had experts at hand to teach them one-on-one. As a result, the attention remained on children who were struggling. We started focusing on children who could not thrive in a typical setting. We began to provide them with further assistance. As a result, there was a significant business opportunity.
As the pandemic’s influence began to wane, we returned to our mission: not simply in reading and numeracy, we want to be that child’s and their parents’ support system. And therefore, beginning in November 2021, we put our focus on delivering virtual one-on-one support to children and their families who have learning disabilities, developmental delays, or behavioural concerns.
Do you think that online system has an edge over traditional systems? What aspects of parenting children with special needs are made easier by KinderPass?
Digital literacy has made it easier for parents to support their children. So, think of a child who is unable to speak and whose parents don’t know the problem. For them, finding a speech therapist or knowing about speech therapists is a huge challenge.
Even if a parent wants therapy, it requires that one of the spouses picks up the child, waits while the therapy is being provided, and then brings the child home. So, it’s a 2–3-hour activity unless you stay next door to the centre. So, we are leveraging the opportunity of digital adoption to therapy.
Through the app, you get everything that you need to do as a parent. That is the gap we are trying to fill. The opportunity today is in holistic paediatric behavioural health. As parents, either they get the parenting app part of it or get a therapy part of it, which is at the centre. The two are not available together and it’s this gap that we are trying to bridge through KinderPass.
How do parents respond when they transition from offline to online therapy and used the platform like KinderPass?
Absolutely! For us, specially in India, health is a very touch-and-feel experience, you want the specialist or the doctor to see your child who can physically interact with the child.
However, any kind of behavioural health or developmental issue is not a binary thing. It is a continuous process. Therefore, one of the biggest factors of any kind of intervention in health, specially in behavioural and mental health, is continuity. And for conditions like ASD, ADHD, learning disabilities and others, it is continuous intervention and support that parents/caregivers and the child, will both need. So, in all of these cases, the number one differentiator is the fact that you can keep up continuity and, more importantly, in the comfort and privacy of your home.
Second, in traditional therapy centres, it’s generally a closed-door therapy. The therapist takes the child, but you don’t know what is being discussed with the child.
In our case, we speak both to the parent and the child. So, the parent can observe what is happening at the session. The app becomes integral where the parents get daily plans on what is to be done and they can track progress as well.
How KinderPass different from other behavioural health platforms available in the market?
We are more of a behavioural health platform, so think of it as two aspects. There is early intervention and there’s early detection. The app helps every parent to ensure that they detect developmental delays, if any. at an early stage.
The only way you can detect it is if you measure right. So, what the app helps with is the detection part of it. That’s why, many apps do it, but the distinctive factor for us is the fact that it is available on platforms where most other apps don’t go.
So today, parents can gauge and learn about their children’s milestones, do activities to aid overall development, keep track of vaccination dates and more – growth and track all the key parameters. Even lessons on our app, what the child is also going to do in the next month or so. Additionally, we are launching on Android and in six Indian languages. We are very much Indian and cater to the needs of Indian parents.
Thus, all of our content will now be based on audio and video. It means you don’t have to be literate to be able to learn what you can do for your child. So, literacy should not be a barrier to giving your child the best you can give as a parent. That’s our mission. This is where we like to differentiate.
The live interaction with the expert is included in the second phase as well. The therapy is in the Indian language. Therefore, parents can select languages their child is familiar with when they fill out a query. So those are distinctive factors that we only provide.
What new projects or activities are you involved in these days besides the se, the regular ones?
So, we have a lot of plans. Last year, we did a growth check campaign in association with Mothercare.
This year we’re making it bigger and is planning an association with a few Pan-India brands like keiki. It is India’s biggest preschool app for fun and learning.
We want to take this to pre-schools and schools where it is important to know whether the child’s development is on track or not, and being able to support or delay, or a difficulty in an easy manner is what we’d like to take to school.
Second, we’d like to work with schools because the biggest difficulty today is that parents sometimes miss red signs because there’s no frame of reference or comparison. However, when they arrive at school, teachers begin to notice difficulties or delays in learning, behaviour, and behavioural concerns.
However, after that, there’s a roadblock because most schools have one psychologist or one counsellor for hundreds of children. So our endeavour will be to partner with preschools and schools over the next 6–12 months to make this a part and parcel of every school-going child.
How are you promoting awareness about your platform to parents who are looking for one like it that would likewise greatly benefit them?
Awareness is the key. Unfortunately, for a country of 165 million children under the age of six, we have only 23,000 registered paediatricians, which is 80% short of what it should be.
We’ve recently started putting some concerted effort in that direction. We do a lot of webinars. We run our weekly newsletter, which now has over 50,000 subscribers which goes out from the founder’s desk.
We just help parents learn better and know better. And there are users who recognize our efforts and tell us that it is so awesome. This encourages us to respond to each user with a lot of love.
What will the company look like in five years? Could you share your plans?
Our mission is to help every child thrive. So today we are at the first step in helping every child thrive by doing the virtual support that we do.
Next would be to take this to millions of children through channels where ever there is, where parents look up to their advice, which is schools and paediatricians. As a result, we would be concentrating on preschool and school chains over the coming year, where we assist them with detection and intervention.
We would like to solve this in India and for Indian parents across the globe, to begin with. Because obviously, the language is an advantage. So, if you’re anyway paying out of your pocket in the UK because the wait times are too long, you’d rather come to India. So, our focus is to then become the provider of choice for all globally. In addition to that, we would want to get into some kind of an offline model.
Would you like to share some of your insights or learnings as an entrepreneur?
I think one of the two biggest traits to be an entrepreneur are: to be resilient and to have a very strong support system.
An entrepreneur’s life is an everyday rollercoaster. So, you wake up and speak to one investor and hear to put you down and say I don’t think there’s a scale in what you build. You speak to one user who would appreciate and love your product and your morale would go up. I think persistence, resilience, perseverance all three together, only make an entrepreneur unbeatable most of the time.
The second is to have a very strong support system. Whether you are a male or a female entrepreneur what you need is the backing of a very strong support system, especially if you’re a woman.
I’m able to work this way because I have a very strong support system in the form of my spouse and my parents who’ve been, rock-solid support over the last three years. So, very strong support system is the second most important aspect that you require as an entrepreneur.
What would be your advice to a young entrepreneur?
My advice to the aspiring entrepreneur would be to just first, get your hands dirty. Learn on the job under someone, because you then learn to work with the company. Whether it is resources in terms of people, or it is money, or it is several users or the ability to reach your users.
Working under someone’s supervision teaches you how to deal with limitations. You come prepared for your own business. So, I would advise, you to do this within the area of work before you start, because you also, as an entrepreneur, are a leader.
You learn to work with constraints, you learn to work with people. when you do that is when there’s a lot of trial and error and through trial by fire, you learn a lot of things and you can bring those learnings back to your own.
