Learnings from building the largest parents' network of India - #1 TRUST

How to build trust? What's a good starting point?

Start with 1. Trust building is 1x1

I remember the initial days, when I had met more than 2000 parents, home to home with a Handy-cam to understand pain points & gain insights into how will we try to solve for it. I learnt that parents' trust like minded parents, that a parent wants to be sure that s/he is talking to real people and not dummies. And so we started verifying each registration by tele-calling them and asking them for details, verifying them. What started with a few calls in the beginning stages, became 100-s of calls every day as we grew. While parents' appreciated the trust and safety of verified profiles, when it came to verifying their own profile, they would get offended at times and ask us, were we doing a passport verification. They were right to get offended, but it was putting a big question mark in our minds. We tried various iterations, but nothing worked, a few parents would bang the phone saying, I don't want to join parentune, if you are so skeptical, then let it be. It feels I am getting a passport made and similar statements.

And then, I remember, one of those calls, where I changed the way we said it, " We want to ensure that we curate a safe space for you and so we verify parents who join the network and that ways, you would be able to differentiate between verified accounts and unverified accounts easily." This worked, it actually worked! I remember calling for a huddle with the team and sharing this subtle change in our communication of "why should a parent do account verification". The essence remained the same, it was just the way we communicated. Parents liked the fact that they were verifying their account to make their network a safe place. Almost like curating a safe neighborhood, deciding to be in a gated & secure neighborhood, where they know that the people living in their neighborhood are verified.

We learnt 2 things.

1. Building trust needs to be done in a way that the one receiving the information is able to visualize a personal benefit of contributing to that trust building process.
2. A trusted network is a plural of individual's trust in the network, and the later has to be done first. So make the individual understand the personal benefit of building such a network for them & that's why they should participate!

There's another interesting anecdote from our pre funding days. I remember one of the potential investors pointing to us that verification was not scalable. He said, "How will you verify parents as you scale? You would become a call centre." He was right.

Thankfully, we listened to him, understood his concern, but thankfully, we did not stop verifying accounts. 3 years later, and ever since, almost every new player in our segment started using the word "safe place" & "community", but could not substantiate it with facts. On the other hand, we have continued with verification throughout our journey, and have more than 3 million verified parent accounts on parentune today. So, we mean it when we say that we are a safe place for parents.

3. Trust building may not lead to instant gratification, but it sure can receive sustained delta over time, which no money can buy.

Watch out :When you are scaling, you can get swayed to look at everything with the same lens. You don't want to use that lens for building trust.

4. I have learnt that, without obsessing with the problem at a unit level, it's premature to obsess with scale.

I learnt that Trust need not be scaled. Trust is built at a 1x1, individual level and can scale if it becomes the part of the Culture. Let me give you an example. When we asked a parent to share their details for verification in 2013-14, we mentioned in T&C that their personal information is only for verification & personalization. This was 5 years before GDPR and privacy guidelines and policy came up.

5.To build trust, think of it as a 1x1 relationship, & share transparently, even if it's not the protocol/legal requirement. Share why you need that information from your consumer and what will you do with it.

When we started doing the calls, it was way back in 2013/14. The OTP-s were not yet in fashion. But then in 2015, we learnt that we could use technology to do verification. And so we used a combination of OTP, social handle sync and personalized feed as per the parent's location and child's age, personalizing the feed for each parent as per their child's age.

Big watch out: While building trust, please don't start with scale as the filter. Some of the best trust building has been done at an individual level. For e.g. You trust the banker, before you trust the bank, and then as these 1x1 trusted relationships increase, the Bank becomes trustable.

6.Trust is built when we are vulnerable but still not taken advantage of. It's not one time, so it's on a loop, time over time, each time, especially if you want to build a trusted network.

The best time to build trust is when your consumer has a pain point. If you earn their trust in times of their need, they will treasure you for life. Build trust for long term.

I remember how when we started curating content for niche topics. We looked at the ecosystem and we found that there was a lot of content out there, but from a parent's point of view, it was difficult to know, which one to trust. Search threw thousands and more results and it was difficult to know, which one is apt for one's own use case, as per the stage and disposition of that certain parent.

We started working on solving for this and created a process to pass the Healthcare content written by Experts through similar more Experts to get it validated extensively. Then we extended this process to nutrition and pregnancy and so on. Today, we have double digit thousand comprehensive content units, which have been validated by the Expert panel comprising of Doctors, Child Psychologists, Healthcare Professionals, Nutrition & learning Experts and so on. It took us 3 years to get there, but it has been worth each day.

There's another thing, which happened in the earlier part of the journey. There was a child abuse incident and a leading newspaper wanted to get reactions. Most of the Experts, known names refused to give a perspective to this question. "How do you explain what is rape to a 5 year old child?". I remember being reached out, and being advised not to engage, that it could be tricky. To me, it has been crystal clear that we are a "parent-child-first" startup, and would always put that on priority#1. I had to help, and so I did. My response was published by the journalist and I remember receiving numerous emails through out that month from so many moms and dads and teachers thanking parentune for being there.

7. Trust is not an act, it's almost like baking a cake. It takes some patience and close watch to bake it well. You hurry the process and you can burn it. Let it bake!

This next incidence is something, which a lot of product folks would resonate with. With growing scale, one of the senior team mates said, "verifying the profile is a pain, and it's because of that may be, that we are missing to improve conversion from installs to an on-boarded parent. And so, let's decouple the two. Let's make verification voluntary, or less potent. We all agreed. That was one of the worse decisions I have taken as a Founder of a network. Thankfully, we corrected it in the next build. I had no data to ask for that roll back, but I was convinced that it's the right thing to do.

8. Trust is not built only with numbers or data, you need to have solid conviction and belief in the problem you are solving, and then make sure that you are not trading off Trust for a vanity metric.

Secrets from the team, from your consumers may build curiosity but it will not build trust. It's important to tell the "why" behind the "what" to your team and to your consumers to earn their trust. This applies to the bad news more than the good news. So, go ahead and share why you have a certain approach to on-boarding, why do you collet data, why do you have cookies, why do you need that personal detail. Share it, get their feedback , make amends, and it's all good.

9. Trust you do, trust you get!

This is more from a Founder's perspective.

If you are in a B2C space, give your consumer the benefit of doubt, especially around transactions, payments and so on. If they say, they will pay, trust them and support them independent of whether they pay or not. I have learnt that, you need to begin with trust in each person, and take that small risk of letting them breaking your trust. The reason I say it's a "small" risk, is because you will gain much more than what you can ever loose.