Tickled Media to expand into e-commerce with focus on mums

Singapore

TICKLED Media, the startup behind parenting portal theAsianparent, is set to launch an e-commerce venture targeting mothers this year, CEO Roshni Mahtani told The Business Times.

Ms Mahtani's remarks come after a KrASIA report on Feb 1 that the company was talking to investors, including Alibaba's Ant Financial and Chinese conglomerate Fosun, on a new round of funding at a pre-money valuation of US$60 million. She declined to comment on the KrASIA report.

When asked for details about the upcoming e-commerce venture, Ms Mahtani said: "If you put two and two together, you can look at Babytree or some of our biggest comparable companies in the world and see what they do with content communities and commerce. And you can have a guess on what we're planning."

Babytree is a Chinese company operating a parenting portal and an e-commerce site, Meitun Mama, which sells maternity and childcare products. It is backed by Alibaba and Fosun.

Tickled Media's e-commerce venture will focus on its existing core audience of Asian mothers. Ms Mahtani expects the e-commerce venture to be loss-making for about four years.

Moving into e-commerce will complete the "loop" with theAsianparent's existing online community offerings, Ms Mahtani reckons. The portal already offers professional and user-generated content and claims to have close to 13 million monthly active users. "The last part is commerce, where the community then chooses to buy from you as well," she said.

However, Tickled Media does not plan to compete with the e-commerce giants of South-east Asia like Shopee, Lazada or Tokopedia. "I hope that we'll be able to partner up with them in many ways. We're taking a very unique spin," Ms Mahtani said, declining to reveal further details.

Founded in 2009, Tickled Media kicked off with theAsianparent, from which it now earns 90 to 95 per cent of its revenue, Ms Mahtani said.

It started three other female-centric content portals last year: AsianMoneyGuide, HerStyleAsia and Nonilo, which focus on personal finance, fashion and food and home respectively.

Sustaining the business model of theAsianparent is far from child's play. The company primarily makes money by actively connecting brand clients to Asian mothers for market research and insights.

"The predominant way we monetise is through market research and insights. It's all anonymous behaviour but we work with FMCGs (fast moving consumer goods companies) who want to target mums and send them polls or questions," Ms Mahtani said.

"For example, a mum who's sitting in Surabaya versus a mum who's sitting in Jakarta, how does she feel about specific slogans or taglines? We're able to get thousands of responses within 24 hours, and we're able to target the poll to the right person," she added.

While declining to divulge the company's client base, Ms Mahtani said it includes multinational corporations with product lines such as diapers and milk powder, along with banks and insurers targeting mothers.

The core media business of Tickled Media hit profitability for the first time last year, according to Ms Mahtani. "I guess there are not many startups that can say the core part of their business is profitable.

"Once we started realising that we were going to hit profitability, we said, okay, now how do we start losing money again?" she said with a laugh.

Beyond the e-commerce foray, Singapore-headquartered Tickled Media will continue to grow its media business in the region. It wants to reach 20 million Asian mothers by the end of 2019.

Indonesia is currently Tickled Media's biggest market. The company also has offices in Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines and Vietnam. It has about 160 full-time employees.

In the last year, the company has been exploring prospects in Nigeria, India, Sri Lanka, Japan, Taiwan and Hong Kong.

"South-east Asia is now an established market for us already... All the funding, announced and unannounced, has always been for expansion," she said.

Tickled Media raised US$6.7 million in Series B funding in May last year, led by Global Grand Leisure and joined by Mountain Pine Capital. DBS provided additional venture debt financing, bringing the startup's total funding to US$11 million.

Vertex Ventures partner Carmen Yuen said that she sees Tickled Media emerging as a "category champion". Vertex, a Temasek Holdings unit, first invested an undisclosed amount of Series A funds in 2015.

"Now you can see the standing that Tickled Media has. They are the number one platform in... the key South-east Asian markets. For them to have 13 million users is not a small task," she said.

When asked about Tickled Media's e-commerce plans, Ms Yuen said: "Those are all in the works... It's a natural progression, if you think about it. Roshni can see the potential there."

The startup has "impressive initiatives" coming up, concurred Paul Rogers, director of fund manager Caber Partners, which manages Mountain Pine Capital.

"Roshni is a relentless founder who is also a mother and has a deep understanding of the space... theAsianparent is doing something that Facebook and Google failed to do, which is providing trusted communities," he said.

Tickled Media's angel investor Will Klippgen agreed that Ms Mahtani would be in an "excellent position" to move into e-commerce, given how parent-focused e-commerce has done well in the US and China.

"When I first met Roshni, it was hard to monetise online websites and she went through a number of rough years," he recalled. However, Ms Mahtani succeeded through careful investments in marketing and regional talent, he said.

Moving ahead, the startup must not get complacent in "building stickiness", as its model can be replicated, said Ms Yuen.

For Ms Mahtani, the question of how to bring Tickled Media to new heights is an interesting challenge: "Media is a growth trajectory for us. Next, how do we now get out of our comfort zone of what we know intimately... and take the company to the next level?"

Tickled Media at a glance