About

From the desk of our co-founder Lovina:

A little history on the beginnings of MomConnect

I had just had my daughter (in 2006). I left the company I was working for when my daughter was a year old and made the difficult decision to join the fine ranks of the SAHM or stay at home moms. I had hardly been in my new role for a month when the CEO (Warren Myer) of my last company called and asked me what I was going to “do”. I’m sure I hummed and hawed (umm, I was doing what I was ‘going to do’ – taking care of my daughter), but I did mention a project I had been mulling over…which was to create a site for my neighborhood moms and I to be able to better connect with each other. There was already a thriving mom network in the neighborhood which was (and still is) awesome. I’ve met a lot of my mom friends through it and am grateful. But I wanted to be able to enhance how we communicated so that we could each focus on the things that mattered most to us (which was probably determined by the age(s) of our child(ren)). When I was talking through my ‘needs’ as a new mom, Warren listened and started offering advice on how the site could be structured. Suddenly, we found ourselves talking about possibilities and one thing led to another and somehow, we decided to form a company to help moms – esp. new moms and moms of young ones. I love the idea of helping new moms connecting and helping each other. There’s no real systematic way to learn about what being a mother entails. And any help I get from other moms is always invaluable.

Creating the team:

I won’t bore you with the details here. In short, we’ve had 2 sets of teams. The original engineering team (a wonderful group of p/t engineers who often worked into the wee hours of the night) who started the development of our site. And now, the current team. The current team consists of myself, John, Erich and Saikat. These are the guys you’ll get to know on this blog as they will share the their versions of the MomConnect journey.

You may have noticed that outside of myself, there aren’t any other moms (let alone, women) on this team.  This has become one of the highlights of this journey and one of the raisons d’être of this blog. Originally, I had visions of working with other moms to build this company. At one time, we had envisioned the possibility of hiring (especially) stay-at-home moms who needed a work outlet even for just a few hours each day. But logistically, we weren’t ready for this as a start up. We needed a small and dedicated team in these initial (and difficult) months.

This blog will catalog the journey of creating this mom-centered company with this team of mostly non-moms. We decided to do this blog for 2 reasons: 1) we need to market our company and cannot ignore the importance of this medium! 2) we felt it would be interesting to share our unique journey with anyone who cared to know. 3) we wanted to offer moms a place to find articles and new of interest to mothers that we have found throughout the verse.

With no further ado, let me introduce the men:

John Pruitt - John was the first on board. I’m going to try to keep my descriptions ‘twitter-short’ but it’s hard with John. Let me sum him up this way: His main expertise is sales. But you would never know that if you met him. He knows how to sell and he’s good at it. Very good at it. But he’s not someone who sells just to sell. He needs to believe in and care about the product. Which, I think, is a great trait. Also, he’s Momconnect’s ‘maharishi’ of all things “internet marketing”. If you so much as walk by him muttering anything sounding like “twitter, blog, facebook…” he will stop in his tracks and force you to talk to him.  Oh, and he’s the father of twin (now grown) boys.
http://www.twitter.com/johnpruitt  http://www.facebook.com/johnpruitt http://www.linkedin.com/in/johnpruitt http://www.flickr.com/photos/johnpruitt http://johnpruitt.yelp.com

Saikat G. - Saikat was the next on board. He is our chief engineer. He’s the pragmatist – he likes order and scaleability. He’s the ‘idea’ guy. And he has good ones. He understands the mindset of social network users. He’s also the lucky and proud father of a nearly 3 year-old. So he’s the next best thing to a Mom…a Dad. Oh, and he eats very little food each day. Probably less than most typical 3 year olds. I’m not kidding.

Erich S. - last but not least, our Product Manager. I’ll describe Erich as “fast-thinking’, ‘clear-headed’ and able to understand and sum up the needs of his audience. He’s one of the most positive and upbeat people you’ll ever meet. He’s also the one person on the team with no children (although he does have a dog he loves named Vasco. I do think this partially qualifies him.)  But with his strong product management background, he seems to be grasping the mom psyche pretty well. Oh, and he has a thick Austrian accent. When he calls across the room to me and I’m not looking, for the first second, I always think Arnold Schwarznegger’s calling out to me.

What I’ve come to realize in working with these guys is that for a company like this, what matters more than being a mom is being someone who cares.  And this team cares. They can get silly, especially when we start talking about mom issues (like breastfeeding…there are actually giggles in the room), but I must say, it’s refreshing to come to work and to see the lighthearted side of ‘mom issues’. Left alone, I’d probably take everything too seriously.

Please join us on our journey (the good, the bad, the ugly, the sleep-deprivation).  The truth? My hope is that you’ll side with me more often than you will with them.