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Name: ChickRx
Quick Pitch: ChickRx is an online community where young women can ask professionals, private and public questions regarding health, sex, beauty and work.
Genius Idea: If your girlfriends don't have the answers ChickRx is the place on the web to get expert advice. Most of the network's experts are also women.
As young Harvard Business School grads, ChickRx's co-founders Stacey Borden and Meghan Muntean, relied on their girlfriends for health, beauty and sex advice.
"As best friends, we realized we were often going to each other with questions and concerns relating to health and wellness whether about our dating lives, our diet, workout, skincare issues," Borden tells Mashable.
The pair of 20-somethings found while there was a wealth of health-related information online, there were holes in the online health content for young women.
"I felt the online health offerings were really targeting women who are older or took an approach that's very clinical not about the everyday discussions we were having," Borden says.
ChickRx offers something different. The community-based social network enlists the help of experts from famed sex coach and Cosmopolitan magazine columnist Amy Levine to registered dentists, dietitians and internists. The expert directory is huge (see for yourself).
ChickRx is an online safe haven for questions from 18-to-39-year-old women. It's a place where you ask anything. Plastic surgeons are available to answer questions about breast augmentations, reproductive health psychologists are there to address concerns about birth control and pregnancy, and peers are readily available to chat about dating. Other popular topics include celebrities, weight loss, cancer, alcohol and stress.
The newly opened community has reached more than 2,000 women so far, who rely on the site as a trusted space for connecting peers and professionals. Male experts can publish content, however, membership is restricted to females only since health and wellness topics can be very personal.
"Our content is very authoritative," she says. "The articles we write ourselves about health news, we take from health journals, we put a fun and relatable spin on it."
In the next couple of months, ChickRx will also offer female-geared products for sale on the web platform.
"We're making health and wellness cool, accessible and fun," Borden says. "We've definitely seen this online platform as just our starting point. We definitely want to do mobile products, and see where this brand can go with consumer products and traditional media."
Image courtesy of Flickr, [Ben]
Series presented by Microsoft BizSpark
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