Lil’ Grams: It’s TheKnot for Families to Cherish Precious Memories

Capturing the moment of your precious children is always a key thing for any parent. Whether it’s your first child or an additional bundle of joy in your household, I’m betting that you’re going to have friends and family knocking down your door to get a peek at the newborn, right? And then you’re going to need to find a way to photograph or video record every single moment of your child’s life and find a way to share it with your loved ones who can’t stop by every day because of travel distance or other obligations. But look no further because Lil’ Grams is on the case.

Started by Gregarious Narain, Lil’ Grams, in my opinion, is probably the TheKnot.com version of baby memory management online. Okay, I said “baby memory management”, but don’t get confused. It’s not supposed to be taken as if Lil’ Grams is a machine and has robotic qualities.

When I say “baby memory management,” I’m talking about how it is a one-stop shop for you to upload your photos or videos of your precious child and organize them so you’ll be able to share your joy with your parents, brothers/sisters, cousins, aunts and uncles, grandparents, and whomever else you want.

But going back to my analogy of Lil’ Grams to TheKnot.com…since it helps you keep your memories organized, it essentially will guide you through the steps of your child’s growth over time. I recently got a sneak peek of this startup courtesy of Narain and here’s what I’ve found that is pretty cool to share:

Imagine you had a recent newborn (you very well might in real life, but go with me here for a second). You’re a proud parent and want to share your joy with your family. Luckily you’re a subscriber to Lil’ Grams. There seems to be so much power involved in what you can do on the site. Pretty much anything you can think of through the evolutionary process of a child’s life can be accomplished on the site – your loved ones will always feel like they’re in touch with your child’s life. So what exactly can this thing do?

• Keeps track of your child’s growth/height so you have accurate records and can look at patterns, as any parent would like – not like a doctor’s chart.
• Allows you to put together a story about your child so you can share their first journey to grandma’s house or first bath experience or even the playtimes they have with the family pet.
• Media storage so you can save those priceless photos and videos online. Remember the time when your child had that bowl of spaghetti over their head? You might want to save that online to send at a later time – maybe during a birthday or Christmas card cover?
• FirstGram allows you to capture every major milestone in your child’s life – and it could be any milestone you choose. Their first step, first word, first playdate, baptism, bar mitzvah, communion, first bike ride, first lost tooth, or whatever you (as the parent) consider a milestone. No structure here on what’s considered a milestone.
• FoodGram allows you to capture the memories of your child’s dietary exploits. Eating that first carrot may be something you want to share (“Hey look! He’s eating vegetables!”).
• WordGram lets you track your child’s word development. So you can have your baby dictionary, of sorts. If they say “baba”, does it mean “bottle”? “Toy”? “Dad”? You can keep track of these quirky words and share them with your friends and family.

So what makes Lil’ Gram similar to TheKnot.com? Does it help you arrange timelines? Not really. Does it give people the option to register for your baby’s parties? Not really. Does it give you resources to plan a child’s party? Nope. What about a personalized to-do list? Does it give you that, at least? Nope. So what then?

It lets you share your memories of your child from a social networking standpoint. Not only is TheKnot.com a website devoted to weddings, but it’s also a way to communicate to your loved ones about your upcoming nuptials so you can make sure that you have everything taken care of.

This is the case with Lil’ Grams from what I’ve seen. You can create a network that you can share with your friends and family so they can visit your “website” and leave comments about your baby’s activities. But if you have more than one child, you can create separate “activities” for each child and have some form of segmentation.

In a way, yes, Lil’ Grams is somewhat similar to TheKnot.com. Sure, it doesn’t have the same features, but each website has its niche. TheKnot.com is a good tracker for weddings while Lil’ Grams looks to be a big player in the family industry. Everyone loves babies, so it’s quite apropos for this to take advantage of the industry.

Oh, did I mention that it exploits the APIs of two major social networks: Twitter & Facebook? Yes, that’s correct. Once you create some activity for your baby in Lil’ Grams, you’re now able to make it more viral by having it posted to your Twitter account & also to your Facebook profile. So emails aren’t the only way to share your precious memories. Look at how you can reach others through social networking. And Twitter & Facebook are probably only just for starters. Many more features may come through later on.

From a business perspective, I believe that they are looking for partners to help them get the site launched. It’s still in its infancy (no pun intended) and looks to be going live with the site hopefully by Father’s Day this year. Interestingly enough it seems that the platform for Lil’ Grams is also able to be scaled to other websites as well.

If you like how the base functionality of the site behaves, I think that Gregarious Narain would like to speak with you to discuss how they could implement that same structure on your site to benefit you. It’s still a little unclear for me to understand how their platform would work for others, but that’s for Lil’ Grams to explain to you.