The What’s Up Moms case tells the story of three friends, Meg Resnikoff, Connie Kin, and Elle Walker, who co-founded a YouTube channel called What’s Up Moms to provide instructive and humorous video content targeted exclusively at moms.  In June 2013, they posted their first videos on YouTube, featuring three episodes per week to profile healthy recipes, the best kid products, how to’s, and fun activities with kids.  When tragedy struck in the fall of that year following Kin’s death due to complications from childbirth, Resnikoff and Walker put the business on hold.  But in early 2014, with the blessing of Kin’s husband, they relaunched What’s Up Moms and the business soon took off.  By 2015, the YouTube channel had reached over 100,000 subscribers and had become a regular destination for highly visible brands to promote their products.  As the What’s Up Moms founders evaluated their options for growing the business, they faced a multitude of choices: 1) accept the offer to anchor a mom-based vertical within Mammoth Media, a multichannel network with which What’s Up Moms was currently partnered; 2) build out a commerce platform to leverage their existing subscriber base; 3) diversify their content delivery platform either by expanding to other online platforms or moving to more traditional channels like books and TV; or 4) develop their own multichannel network to maintain control of their own destiny, at the risk of competing against an 800-pound gorilla in the space.

Learning Objective
1. Identify the key growth accelerators and growth inhibitors for What’s Up Moms to date. 

2. Consider What’s Up Moms as a generic online content company. Identify two companies you believe demonstrate important lessons for What’s Up Moms as it considers its 2016 strategic direction. What are the lessons What’s Up Moms can draw from these two companies? 

3. Identify the pros and cons of each alternative presented in “The Path Ahead” section, and formulate a recommendation for the option you would pursue as What’s Up Moms’ cofounders. 

4. Based on your recommendation above, what infrastructure, systems, processes, etc. would you put in place to ensure that you maximized your chances for success?