Interviewed By Sumaiya Siddique, MBR Team

MBR: Since the launch of its website in 2019, ToguMogu has garnered more than one lakh visitors per month in their official website and app. Will you kindly share with us what inspired you to come up with the idea for ToguMogu?

Dr. Nazmul Arefin: We started our journey realizing the pain points of young parents, and specifically the new parents, when one of our co-founders, Maruf, became a father to a beautiful daughter in 2016. He was one of the few people within our friend circle at that time to become a parent.

 So, we started ideating a technology-enabled solution to help young parents across the country, which led us to launching ToguMogu in 2017. We wanted a name that would make people smile and be curious simultaneously, and hence we chose the name ToguMogu. ToguMogu, which represents our mascots Togu, a tiger cub, and Mogu, a human child.

 We spent some time understanding the needs and pain points of our target users. In addition, we conducted some research in order to determine how parenting works in Bangladesh and how technology could be used to help them.

 In the beginning, we started as a content platform providing parents with authentic information, and then we gradually added other services, including an e-commerce shop, and integrated numerous third party services, such as doctor booking, photography, and caregiving. We now have a fully functional app where parents can track their child’s growth and enjoy other exciting features.

 MBR: All successful businesses undergo some challenge in their initial stage. Will you please tell us what were the challenges you faced in the early days and how did you deal with them?

 Dr. Nazmul Arefin: In our initial years, we have focused on building experience and preparing our startup to be an industry standard service platform. Recently, we are working on raising funds to achieve our short term and long-term goals. As we are working on an interesting market with enormous opportunity, we are getting good response from the investors. Recently, we have taken part in an Accelerator Program - “Accelerate Bangladesh”, an initiative from Bangladesh Angels Network (BAN), Better Stories Ltd and Bridge for Billions. We have already raised our angel round last January and are now working on seed stage investment.

Due to COVID, it has been very challenging for us as we are still in the seed round, especially to keep the team focused on specific goals, not deviating to generate quick revenue, which was a challenge for us to overcome for funding. We are happy that we have survived the hard part of the struggle and are now more focused and stronger to attract new investors.

MBR: ToguMogu has come with great innovative ideas to support young parents. Will you please give us an overview of the products and services 29 of 36 provided by ToguMogu currently and tell us a little bit about how the operation works?

Dr. Nazmul Arefin: Currently, we have paid services like ecommerce, finding a nanny, and baby photography service, while we also have our free continents and daycare discovery services. Recently, we did a survey among our users where we find users who are looking for daycare solutions, preschool and kindergarten selection tools, and expert consultancy services.

 In our ecommerce section, baby products, books and toys are in high demand. As we source our products directly from manufacturers and authentic suppliers, our customers have good trust on our platform.

 Currently our team is focusing on three key aspects. We are improving our app so that users can avail services and knowledge with ease. Our tech team is continuously taking user feedback and improving our algorithm and overall UI/UX of the platform. Our content team is producing age-appropriate contents vetted by experts so that Bangladeshi parents can track their children’s development from pregnancy, while our ecommerce team is dedicated to support customers who buy products and services.

Our daily goal is to support parents via all channels including our own app, social media and through our call center. While our top management is working on achieving long term goals including exponential growth in terms of users, expanding services, and improving the quality of customer experience with the platform. Currently, we are raising investment in order to become a growth stage company from a seed stage company.

 MBR: The idea of parenting apps is still relatively new in Bangladesh. Can you please tell us how you have attracted customers and grown ToguMogu? What are some strategies you carried out to achieve this growth?

Dr. Nazmul Arefin: Making parents’ lives easier is our primary focus. All our planning and strategy was geared towards that goal. In the early days, this customer-centric strategy helped us build trust. Once, we delivered baby products directly to the hospital after receiving a call from a customer who used to read our contents during pregnancy. As a result of the accurate information we provided, they converted into our customer.

 There are many examples like this where we have gone the extra mile, and this has been our commitment since day one. Our goal was to source from the best suppliers and not sell any harmful products to the parents.

 We also provided parents with advice regarding choosing the right product or service, which assisted us in gaining customer trust at an early stage. With regards to running the business, we always tried to utilize our co-founders’ skills first, which initially saved us a lot of money.

 Currently we are working with large corporates to attract working parents. We have already partnered with WALTON group where 30 thousand of their employees will get benefitted from our parenting app. There are few more partnerships which are under process and they will give us a boost by the end of this year.

MBR: What are your long-term goals for ToguMogu? What are some milestones you would like to see ToguMogu achieve within the next few years?

Dr. Nazmul Arefin: Currently we have 60 thousand parents registered on our platform. These parents will have easy access to information and tools that will help them to ensure the health and wellbeing of their children and themselves. Recently, we have launched our Pregnancy and Child growth tracking features, and a vaccination tracker will be released soon. Our expert team is continuously working on improving the existing services, which will unlock new features for millennial parents. We are also working to help the government achieve SDG 3 targets through our work, which is ensuring Good Health and Wellbeing. Initially we are targeting to serve 200 thousand parents by the next 12 months. We are aiming to reach 5 million parents locally and gradually expand to other countries by 2025. Within the next 10 years we will be able to impact 50 million parents and their children globally.