SVP of Consumer Experience, Baby Center, LLC,
and CEO/Founder of Maya’s Mom
www.babycenter.com
Ann Crady will be one of the featured speakers at our BYOB (Be Your Own Boss) event on September 6 in San Francisco. Click here for more info.
Where Ann Crady goes, online conversation follows. First Crady got people to dish about their favorite cars, while serving as the director of business development for Yahoo! Autos. But she knew it would be even easier to get people gabbing about the one topic that inspires more passion in people than cars: motherhood. As the mother of two small children herself, Crady was active in both content-based and geography-based groups for mothers. She saw the potential of harnessing the Internet to connect even more moms, and decided to launch a business.
After weighing concerns that the entrepreneurial path would take too much time away from the very children who had inspired her vision, Crady and her husband decided it was too good of an idea to ignore. With her employer’s blessing, Crady tapped her colleagues at Yahoo! for an engineer who was willing to go start-up. With her own seed money and her technology expert in place, Maya’s Mom was born in 2005. The site, which was like a MySpace for moms, was an even bigger sensation than Crady had anticipated. It was acquired by Johnson & Johnson in 2007 and is now part of BabyCenter, LLC, which reaches more than 4 million parents.
What we learned from Ann: “I think entrepreneurs make a big mistake when they think that they have to keep their ideas so close to their chest because they’re so amazing, and so different, and so new. Certainly there are some businesses where that matters, but as a general rule, I think that’s a big mistake that entrepreneurs make.”
Ready, Set, Go?
“I always knew it was a big idea. But quitting my job was a very different thing. I definitely recognized that there was a very large audience out there; obviously a lot of moms. There were a very large number of them who used these online tools already, and even more who talked to each other offline. One of the rules of starting a business is you have to make sure you’re going after a big market, and clearly I was. The bigger challenge was figuring out, especially from a personal standpoint, whether I was ready to start my own company. That was really the thing that took much longer.”
The Big Question
“I definitely am a workaholic, and I tend to throw myself into a job. Whether it’s working for myself, or working for a big company or a small company, I tend to dive deep, and so that was our biggest concern—could I have enough time for family and for work?”
