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Recently, Girls in Tech had another great learning opportunity for entrepreneurs an event featuring Circle of Moms. Circle of Moms is the fastest growing online community for mothers and has more than 2,000,000 users. This is absolutely amazing considering the app launched in late 2008.

Another interesting fact about Circle of Moms is that it is founded by 2 single men.  It has now grown to 8 people and only one of them is a woman. The question that comes to most who know that the founding team is two single guys is–what do two single guys know about motherhood? How were they able to grow so quickly? Especially without spending on any offline or search marketing efforts.

According to CEO Ephraim Luft and CTO Mike Greenfield their growth is the result of their usage of agile methodologies for idea generation, development and improvement. Chief among these are the following philosophies:

• have no preconceptions about the customers
• develop new features quickly and iterate if they gain traction i.e. your customers like them.

For Circle of moms living these philosophies has meant a strong focus on analytics and research based product decisions.

Strong analytics and research

While Circle of Moms uses other tools like Google Analytics for information like distribution of customers using different browsers, in general it uses its own customized analytics software. This software allows them to query customer responses to several site variables very quickly.

Analytics insight has driven many big and small decisions for the company. In fact even the decision to focus on the mom market was a result of analytics. When the founders were working on the app “Circle of Friends” they found that the CTR for friend circles based on the mom connection was much higher. And Circle of Moms was born.

User movement through the customer funnel

The Circle of moms’ team is also constantly keeping an eye out for ways to improve customer movement from the different buckets in their customer funnel. As they notice high drop offs at various parts of the funnel they tweak customer communications to improve movement. I noticed two customer messages that are probably driven by improving customer movement through the funnel.

In this notification to users after installation, Circle of Moms welcomes them and reminds them to bookmark the application to prevent loosing it. A clever way to drive users who install Circle of Moms to keep returning.

Here is another one.

This is a mommy badge. This allows  members to display information about their child or children on their facebook profile. A great way to drive facebook profile viewers into the app as the badge takes you into the Circle of Moms app to learn more about the child.

Other sources of ideas

Circle of Moms also tracks other analytical information about their users including demographics and more interestingly engagement. Some engagement metrics they track are frequency of visits and most active communities. These metrics coupled with feedback from customer focus groups and community managers helps them concentrate research and resources on specific communities/user needs.

Reason for success: constantly getting to know your customer

One GIT member was an aggressive nonbeliever in the Circle of Mom and its success. She felt that two single guys cannot possibility make a winning product for moms. Why? “Because they aren’t even women!” She said she didn’t believe in their numbers and felt that entrepreneurs who are members of a target market are more passionate about their product and thus more likely to make a great product. Ephraim’s answer was that sometimes such passion means making a product you want rather than making a product your target customers want.

I couldn’t agree more and I am highly surprised that in this age of data and analytics we are arguing for membership in a market driver for success. In my opinion winners are always those who are constantly learning what a market wants and gives it to them. Circle of Moms has definitely been doing this so far. Lots of luck to them. I believe they are on the path of winning!

*Correction 3/3/09 only one of the founders is single. Mike the CTO is happily married. My apologies to Mike and his wife for that mistake.

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