Storybook app gives parents an assist putting kids to bed with music, stories
Francisco Cornejo and Daniela Vega knew they were onto something when their children started fighting over who went to bed first for story time.
Vega had combined infant massage, music and bedtime stories to help their kids fall asleep — and it also brought them closer as a family. That’s when they decided to develop an app that provides parents with a selection of age-appropriate stories and music and directs them with bedtime massage techniques.
Together, “the result is a relaxing moment filled with love that will help both parent and child to bond, relax and sleep better,” Vega said. “I cannot stress enough the importance of physical affection.”
On the day this entrepreneurial couple launched their Storybook app publicly in 2019, 300 families paid for the service immediately. The initial reviews — and the thousands that would roll in later — confirmed exactly what the couple had experienced with their children. For the couple’s innovation, Storybook is the winner of the 2022 Miami Herald Startup Pitch Competition’s community track. The track was managed by Endeavor Miami, the startup support and networking group with expertise scaling young companies.
“We heard, ‘It’s helping my kids to sleep better but we are connecting so much more, we are getting closer, I feel I’m bonding more with my kids,’ ” Cornejo said. “This can have transformation impact, and we wanted to take this worldwide.”
Storybook (Storybook-app.com) targets newborns to 12-year-olds or even older. Vega has created content appropriate for all the age groups, sometimes in partnership with foundations. For 4to 6-year-olds, for instance, her stories get more complex, discussing emotions, using kind words, and having respect for others and their differences. Some stories include children with autism, Down Syndrome and physical disabilities.
Storybook hired a small team in late 2019 and raised its first round of funding from prominent Silicon Valley investor Jason Calacanis and others in 2020. Last month, Storybook secured $500,000 in investor commitments and received $100,000 from Google for Startups’ new Latino Founders Fund, $50,000 from a Miami-Dade County startup grant program, and $25,000 from City National and eMerge Americas.
To date, the startup has drawn over 2 million downloads and is on track to exceed $2 million in annual revenue, up from $500,000 last year, said Cornejo, who previously headed marketing for Honda Motors in Ecuador. Storybook is closing a $2 million seed funding round now and preparing for a Series A funding round. The couple moved their family to South Florida in January.
In collaboration with Florida International University and an Ecuadorean university, Storybook plans a clinical trial to add to the scientific data about the benefits of Storybook’s product. While there are studies on the benefits of infant massage, bedtime stories and music, “we will have the first study on the combination of these three things together,” Cornejo said.
Annual subscriptions to Storybook are priced at under $50, with discounts for multiyear packages. (There also is a limited free version). Companies including City National Bank and Telefonica have offered subscriptions as an employee benefit, and Kimberly-Clark has included Storybook in customer promotions. The app is available in English, Spanish and Portuguese with Japanese, German and other languages on the road map.
What keeps this couple going? “The reviews 100%,” Cornejo said. “Every single review that we get from the App Store and Google Play and in our DMs [direct messages] we post on a Slack channel for everyone on the team to see.”