Bénédicte Castanet (EDHEC Master 2007) presents LeCouffin.fr, a platform to advise and reassure future parents!

Bénédicte Castanet (EDHEC Master 2007) is 38 years old and the mother of 2 young children. After 10 years working in marketing and communication, Bénédicte embarked on her entrepreneurial adventure by creating "Le Couffin", a young startup in the field of parenting support. This year she is competing for La Fabrique Aviva, which rewards the best social entrepreneurship project, a project that has already garnered over 18,500 votes!

Can you tell us in a few words how your project was born?

I started this project at the end of my 2nd maternity leave. I found that the perinatal period was particularly trying, whether for a first or second child.

I felt both very happy and very alone in the face of my doubts and my first steps as a mother. I regretted that the parents were not better accompanied during this key period of our life which impacts at the same time our health, the development of our child, our couple life, our social life and our professional life!

This is how the Le Couffin platform was born, with the aim of better surrounding, advising and reassuring future and young parents.

Describe your company

LeCouffin.fr is the first parenting support platform that combines friendliness, information and support. Concretely, we offer group workshops and individual videoconference meetings with experts in parenting, early childhood and perinatal health. These workshops are held in small groups to promote interactivity and conviviality.

About fifty themes are proposed on a wide variety of topics covering the entire parental journey from pregnancy to the child's 6th birthday. To date we are 3 in the team with about fifteen professionals who accompany the future and young parents.

What is your initial assessment of this entrepreneurial adventure?

If I had to do it again, I wouldn't hesitate!

On a human level, it has allowed me to meet passionate and committed people with very varied profiles and backgrounds. It's an incredible adventure to start from scratch and little by little to unite hundreds of people around a project, each one bringing his or her own contribution to the edifice.

Professionally, I have never progressed as much as I have in recent years. The challenge of getting a project off the ground is such that we draw on unsuspected resources and challenge ourselves on things we would never have dared to do before.

And in terms of quality of life, it certainly involves a lot of sacrifice and the pace is intense, but it brings flexibility and freedom that are invaluable.

What advice can you give to young entrepreneurs?

Entrepreneurship is all about doors opening... or not. But to move forward, you have to DARE to knock. Don't stay alone, tell the world about your project, dare to be ambitious and go and find the skills and funds you need to develop it effectively!

What are the next steps for "Le Couffin" ?

Now that our "MVP" (Minimum Viable Product) is online and working, we want to go much further in our offer and our impact :

- Expand the workshop schedules and themes, with the possibility to access a replay,

- Optimize the user experience: interface, navigation, accessibility, cross platform (mobile and web)

- Automate our processes in order to easily absorb the increasing demand.

The development of the V2 platform is the stake of our business model based on the scalability of our product.

Commercially, partnerships are being discussed with companies to help them support their employees who have become parents and facilitate the return to work after maternity or parental leave.

In addition, there is also a need to federate all initiatives for local meetings between parents, whether they come from municipalities, associations or private players, to give them greater visibility. These could be perfectly integrated into our platform.

We therefore need financial resources in the short term to meet the growing demand and achieve our development ambitions.