Roshni Mahtani Cheung

I was 25, in New York, babysitting a three-year-old, and I needed to know whether it was safe to give her durian. The internet had a great deal to say about parenting. All of it was written for a mother in Ohio. Nobody had thought to ask what a three-year-old in Singapore might eat, or what a grandmother in Jakarta might say about it, or whether you could hand a toddler a fruit that smells like a gym bag.

So I bought a domain for ten dollars, which remains the best money I have ever spent, and I wrote the first thousand articles myself. I had no children. I had, in fairness, been one, and I counted that as research.

People ask why I didn't wait. Two reasons. I am impatient, and I wanted to make the world a better place, and it was obvious that if you want the most impact you start where life starts. Better parents raise better children. Better children grow up and fix the things we couldn't. I didn't have a baby yet, but I knew that when I did, I'd want someone to have done this work already. Nobody had. So.

I also didn't have a rich mummy or daddy behind me, which I now count as a competitive advantage. My family lost most of what it had in the 1997 crisis, when I was fifteen. I handed out flyers at MRT stations and earned my first pay cheque telemarketing. Having nothing to fall back on does wonders for your focus.

The days are long, the years are short. Enjoy the moments, even the ones at 3am.

When a baby is born, a parent is born too, with no instructions and no sleep. It is okay to be clueless. That is what the community is for. If you squint, the whole of theAsianparent is a very large room of people saying "me too" in the middle of the night. I built the room because I wanted to be in it.

The proudest one never went near a boardroom. It was finding and marrying the right man. I kissed a great many frogs on the way, and I would like the record to show that I was thorough. There is no one else I would want to raise a child with, or grow old with, than my husband Darius. He also started a company, which means dinner at ours is half board meeting, half nursery rhyme, and nobody is entirely sure which.

The one I got wrong took longer to notice. I spent years caring what other people thought of me, and trying to be what a Sindhi girl is supposed to be: agreeable, decorative, and quiet. I failed on all three counts, and I have never been happier. Letting go of that was the best thing I ever did for the company, and for me.

Today theAsianparent is the most downloaded parenting app in Southeast Asia, reaching 20M parents across our platforms. Those parents told us what they needed, and it was rarely another article. So we built the rest: Mama's Choice, because in 2016 I moved from Singapore to Indonesia with a brand-new baby, went looking for halal-certified products made for mothers, and found a gap where the shelf should have been; Little Rei, because parents wanted a better diaper; a distribution business, because the best global brands weren't reaching the region; Motherswork, the retailer Sharon Phoong-Wong founded in 1998, because parents still like to push a stroller before they buy it; and Webtretho, because Vietnam's mothers had a home online already and it would have been rude to build next door. The Parent Inc now works across 12 markets in Asia with a team of 281, from Singapore, and mostly during nap time.

The work I am proudest of is Project Sidekicks. Too many parents lose a baby and are left to grieve alone, politely, as if it hadn't happened. Since 2020 our kick counter has logged more than 35 million kicks, more than 50,000 parents have used Healing Mode after a loss, and our advocacy helped move Singapore's definition of stillbirth from 28 weeks to 22. That is a sentence I would not have known how to write at 25. I know now.

I want to be able to say that I helped millions of parents on their journey and made it just that wee bit easier. That's it. That's the whole ambition. Everything else is a line item.