Stay at home mom finds success with startup

Life’s daily struggles make it easy to forget how hard it is to be a mother, let alone a working one. Lebanese Ingrid Salloum, like many other working moms who have to choose between work and family, opted to leave a good job to stay home with her kids. While that decision may spell the end for many professional women’s careers, Salloum decided to make her stay at home… more entrepreneurial.

With a Master’s degree in Financial Economics from the American University of Beirut, Salloum took a job at Lebanese bank Credit Libanais Bank as a financial analyst, then as a project manager at the United Nations Development Program. In 2007, she moved to Cisco where she was involved in the educational field. There, she managed the implementation of an online education initiative. “It was all under Corporate Social Responsibility,” she said during a call. “I loved this field [education]. You see the impact of what you can do.” After working for five years at Cisco, she quit her job. “Then I became a mom,” she said passionately.

… Then I became a mom

“I wanted to stay with them [her kids]. I wanted to stay involved and in Lebanon, very few companies support [working] moms.”

At home, she observed every single detail of her kids’ routine. Salloum noticed how easily distracted they can get after they come home from school and how hard it is to make them read books instead of watching television. So she decided to build a solution that will provide them with something fun, beneficial and educational. “At this age [she has a 3-year-old boy and a 1-year-old girl], you can really impact the habits of the kids.”

Her solution was Create My Book, a tool that allows parents to make personalized books and stories for their kids by changing the characters’ names to the kids’ and making them the hero of the story. “The idea is to encourage reading at the early stage, from 1 to 11 years.” Create My Book is founded under the idea that once the story is about the kid, he or she will love to read it,” she said.

Original article by Reine Farhat

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Stay at home mom finds success with startup