Tamanna Dhamija started by building a community for mothers with Baby Destination. The first-time founder then went on to create Convosight, one of the biggest global community monetisation platforms from India
Tamanna Dhamija, cofounder and CEO of Convosight. Image: Madhu Kapparath
December 2016, New York. Tamanna Dhamija was starting her entrepreneurial journey on an exaggerated note. Well, you can’t blame the rookie founder for being full of chutzpah. After all, Dhamija ticked all the right boxes. In November 2007, she made her professional debut with New York-based General Motors Asset Management. In fact, the MBA graduate in finance was the youngest woman to start as a portfolio manager taking care of $250 million worth of assets under management; she soon developed tools used for investment and risk analytics for global public markets, and over the next eight-and-a-half years climbed up the corporate ladder at a fast clip. Now at the growth stage of her career, Dhamija was poised for a bigger role.
Then came March 2016, and her confidence morphed into brashness. With a two-and-a-half year toddler to take care of, and zero experience in running a business, Dhamija decided to quit her promising job, sacrifice her cushy life and relocate to India to build a community of new mothers. In fact, her husband, who had been in the US for over 20 years, was impressed with his wife’s business plan and vision, and he too quit his job and decided to become a partner in crime. “Some people thought both of us have lost our jobs, and that’s why we are relocating,” smiles Dhamija, who was sure that she had hit on something big.
The business idea, in fact, got triggered in early February 2014. It was May, Dhamija’s maternity leave was about to end, and the new mom was all set to go back to work. There was a ‘toddler’ problem, though. Her son won’t take the bottle! The hapless mom tried every trick in the book, including ordering all kinds of expensive bottles. The child, though, didn’t budge. Then one fine day, one of her friends added Dhamija to a WhatsApp group of new moms. “Magic happened. A suggestion from another mum helped,” she recalls.
The incident made Dhamija realise the power of being in a community.
Once seeded, the ‘community’ idea started to grow. Over the next two years, on her multiple trips to India, Dhamija realised there were hundreds of moms who too were grappling with their share of problems. What if, she wondered, there is a platform that builds communities for moms around specific pain points. There was a huge opportunity, and Dhamija finally took the plunge in December 2016 by starting Baby Destination. The founder soon found her angel in Tariq Khan who handed over a cheque of $25,000. “I feel you guys will do something big,” reckoned Khan, who was Dhamija’s boss at General Motors.
(This story appears in the 24 March, 2023 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)