Momspresso: Providing a safe digital space for mothers in India with Google Cloud
About Momspresso
Momspresso is a platform that aims to empower mothers in India by a) enabling them to express themselves in any of 10 languages through text, video, and audio content and b) helping them earn through participation in brand campaigns to facilitate word-of-mouth marketing.
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About Searce
Searce is a niche cloud consulting business with futuristic tech in its DNA, focused on “realizing the Next in the Now” for its clients. Specializing in cloud data engineering, AI/ML, and advanced cloud InfraTech such as Anthos and Kubernetes, Searce is one of the top partners for Google Cloud globally, with 3,000+ clients successfully moved to cloud.
With Google Cloud, Momspresso enables mothers in India to express themselves through text, audio, and video content, while connecting them with relevant consumer brands to enable word-of-mouth marketing at scale, on a platform running in a reliable, scalable, and cost-effective infrastructure.
Google Cloud results
- Supports increase in page views from 20 million to 100 million per month
- Provides the security, performance and stability to secure support from a user cohort comparatively new to digital services
- Enables the business to diversify content from text to audio and video
Supports 4X growth with cloud costs only increasing 2X
Empowering and providing a safe space for mothers in India is the driving force behind Momspresso, a platform that enables users to express themselves using text, video, and audio content. Founded in 2010, Momspresso now enables mothers to post in one or more of up to 10 languages on topics such as their experiences as mothers, women and the myriad roles and relationships that they are a part of in life, as well as providing a channel for mothers to connect with brands and participate in different types of marketing campaigns.
“Mothers are often accountable for household expenses in India and are a prime target for brands that market fast-moving consumer goods,” explains Asif Mohamed, co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, Momspresso. “We provide a digital space and solutions that span the marketing funnel to enable these and other brands to reach out to mothers in India.”
Momspresso started operations in 2010 under the brand mycity4kids and, until 2017, relied on a traditional cloud service to meet its infrastructure needs. However, as the business scaled, Asif and his team became concerned about rising costs and the lack of local support and partnerships that could resolve issues quickly. “Those experiences proved quite disconcerting as we grew,” says Asif.
“Keeping data and the platform secure is critical to maintaining this trust and Cloud Armor helps us do this.”
—Asif Mohamed, co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, MomspressoA future with Google Cloud
Momspresso then began working with Google Cloud to determine whether to adopt a multicloud architecture or to migrate all its workloads to the cloud platform. The business decided that its future was with Google Cloud. “As a startup, we found very clear value in moving from our existing cloud service to benefit from the very, very competitive pricing on Google Cloud,” says Asif. “Furthermore, we wanted to maximize the opportunities presented by products such as the BigQuery cloud data warehouse and felt moving our data processing to Google Cloud would make using the service more effective.”
Momspresso opted to work with Google Cloud partner Searce on the migration, based on the organization’s technical skills, track record of delivery, and an office location nearby in Gurgaon. Searce helped Momspresso develop a cloud architecture to meet its needs and assisted with the initial movement of a few servers and workloads into the new environment. At this point Momspresso’s internal team took over and the business has now moved 90%–95% of its workloads into Google Cloud, with the remainder due for migration within the next 12 months as internal resources allow.
Google Cloud and Searce now provide ongoing support, and Asif is extremely pleased with the rapid turnaround times in resolving issues.
“Post-migration, Google Cloud and Searce have been extremely responsive, particularly in relation to issues involving production systems,” he says. “For example, early in 2021 we had a full DNS outage due to problems within our domain and within a day, the Searce and Google Cloud teams worked on resolving that issue.
“Searce has been particularly helpful in delivering fantastic turnaround times, either through top-quality first-level support or in escalating more complex issues to Google Cloud for resolution.”
“Cloud CDN, Cloud Load Balancing, and other Google Cloud products and services have been absolutely critical in helping enable the growth and scale we’ve achieved over the last three years.”
—Asif Mohamed, co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, MomspressoCloud Armor builds trust
Momspresso now uses a range of Google Cloud products and services to run its platform, with the Cloud Armor network security service among the Google Cloud security products and features that help the business maintain the confidence of its user base.
At Momspresso, we create trust that enables mothers to share their deepest, most personal stories on our platform,” explains Asif. “Keeping data and the platform secure is critical to maintaining this trust and Cloud Armor helps us do this.”
Google Kubernetes Engine meets Momspresso’s requirement to deploy, scale, and manage applications running in a containerized Kubernetes environment, while Cloud Bigtable provides a high-performance database service. Text-to-Speech enables moms to turn text into audio formats on the Momspresso platform, while Places API ensures users can provide precise information about their location so Momspresso can match them to location-specific brand campaigns. Cloud CDN enables the organization to deliver content quickly and reliably to users, while Cloud Load Balancing distributes user traffic across instances of Momspresso’s applications to minimize any risk of performance issues.
“Cloud CDN, Cloud Load Balancing, and other Google Cloud products and services have been absolutely critical in helping enable the growth and scale we’ve achieved over the last three years,” says Asif. “When we moved to Google Cloud, we had 400,000 unique visitors a month—now we are at 4 million unique visitors per month.”
The number of page views on Momspresso has grown from 20 million per month to 100 million per month since the migration to Google Cloud, while the number of languages supported has grown from four to 10.
This audience does not want to deal with slow or cumbersome processes—it wants services that are easy to use and always available, and Google Cloud helps us deliver these.”
—Asif Mohamed, co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, Momspresso4x growth with only 2x cloud cost increase
“All in all, with Google Cloud, we have increased fourfold, while our cloud costs have merely doubled,” says Asif.
The availability and performance delivered by Google Cloud is key to building an audience of whom many are comparatively new to digital technologies. “About three years ago, 70%-plus of the digital audience in India was men and only about 25% women—but the largest growth since then has occurred among women, with 170 million women added to the digital space in India in the last three years,” explains Asif. “This audience does not want to deal with slow or cumbersome processes—it wants services that are easy to use and always available, and Google Cloud helps us deliver these.”
Meanwhile, BigQuery enables the business to analyze the performance of campaigns run for brands and helps build deeper profiles of the mothers that participate in these campaigns.
Furthermore, Google Cloud supports the diversification of the types of content on the platform, from text to more complex formats such as video and audio.
The business regards AI and machine learning as vitally important to its continued growth. “We are using machine learning to power a strong recommendation engine to ensure users interact with content relevant to them, as well as Momspresso MyMoney, which is a new word-of-mouth influencer marketing platform,” explains Asif. “We gather information about mothers as they participate in campaigns, plus they give us information about themselves, and we also gain information from social profiles they connect us to, so we use machine learning to create deeper profiles about them. This enables us to become more effective at matching the right mom to the right brand campaign.
“Overall, we are extremely pleased with the products and services from Google Cloud and the support from Searce,” concludes Asif. “I am looking forward to deeper conversations about how we can re-architect our technology stacks using some of the other products Google Cloud has to further optimize performance, cost, and availability, and to further explore the potential of the Google Cloud partner network to help us execute our vision.”
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About Momspresso
Momspresso is a platform that aims to empower mothers in India by a) enabling them to express themselves in any of 10 languages through text, video, and audio content and b) helping them earn through participation in brand campaigns to facilitate word-of-mouth marketing.
About Searce
Searce is a niche cloud consulting business with futuristic tech in its DNA, focused on “realizing the Next in the Now” for its clients. Specializing in cloud data engineering, AI/ML, and advanced cloud InfraTech such as Anthos and Kubernetes, Searce is one of the top partners for Google Cloud globally, with 3,000+ clients successfully moved to cloud.