In these tough economic times, mothers need easier access to resources.

Seven years ago, I launched Motherly with my co-founder Liz Tenety, simply because it didn’t exist — we couldn’t find the women-centered, expert-driven, empowering guide to motherhood that we needed ourselves. Since then, we’ve created a global community of more than 40 million mothers and spend our days informing, inspiring and educating you to live your best life as a woman and a mother.

The week of January 22, we launched the new “Motherly,” which is about being the most valuable parenting brand by making all of our classes by Motherly free to all. Meaning, all of our expert-backed digital classes will be free for our registered users, free membership, and we’re also launching an innovative bookmarking feature.

How many times have you read an article about a future stage and wanted to save it? Moms are constantly screenshotting things, so for our registered users, we’re launching a bookmarking feature so as they read Motherly content, they can bookmark it and save it for the future. We’re also going to be sharing exclusive discounts and offers with her that are customized to her age and stage of where she is.

I found that if we’re trying to achieve our mission of empowering mothers to thrive, and redefining motherhood with them, we can’t just be doing it for the 50% of the population that can afford it when 50% of children in the U.S. are born on WIC and Medicare. Motherly is an education platform, and education is an important social determinant of health, so the better educated a mother is, the better mother she can be.

I went to my board, and they thought building up the paid classes platform would be the route to monetizing, but I said, “We’re going into a potential recession here; people aren’t going to spend their disposable income on this. Women need more free resources and support right now when it comes to parenting, and so we’re going to make this free and available to them.”

What that means from a business perspective for me is that I’m going to grow my registered user base on Motherly so I can better monetize with our brand partners, our advertisers. We introduced our classes By Motherly as a free education platform for mothers, and we are committed to continuing to grow our audience, our impact, our business, while being profitable, too.

We’ll not only be the most valuable parenting platform to our audience, but the most valuable parenting platform to our advertisers. This will allow for targeting in a powerful way in a cookie-less world as ads change in the future with privacy. We’ll have a lot of first-party data on this audience because of the information they share with us, and what we’re giving them for free.

In addition to this, we have spent the last several years really understanding our mothers, which we are able to do through our annual State of Motherhood Report, the largest statistically significant study on motherhood in the U.S. Our goal at Motherly is to fully and completely understand today’s mother and be able to serve her in every way she needs, from content to commerce and educational resources.

I believe in the future, there will be extension opportunities for Motherly, whether it be prenatal vitamins or other books, and such. There will be product extensions in our future, but right now we’re laser focused on conserving this generation and continuing to grow with her into this tween and teen phase, and supporting mothers along the entire journey of motherhood.

I believe that when mothers thrive, families and communities thrive. I’m energized each morning to provide content, community and classes for mothers so they can thrive as both a mother and a woman. As cofounder and CEO, I wear hats and primarily see my role as unblocking our leaders so they can do their important work at Motherly. Tactically speaking, I have four responsibilities: 1) setting the company vision and strategy, 2) reinforcing our company culture and hiring good people, 3) serving as custodian of our brand and 4) ensuring we don’t run out of money, managing investors, innovating new revenue streams, etc.

As a platform that has always been women-centered and expert driven, we continue to find ways to best serve the mothers of our community and we believe that our free classes will help to empower our audiences of moms with education and, hopefully, promote better maternal health outcomes.  However, it is important for us to point out that Motherly is not a lifestyle business — it’s a venture-backed, high-growth business, and my strategy from the very beginning was connect, condition, convert. We will continue to use this formula for growth because it allows us to stay true to our audience of mothers, our investors and board and our employees. I am energized for the future of Motherly and believe firmly that the work we are doing at Motherly has and will continue to create a better world for mothers.

Jill Koziol is the co-founder and CEO of Motherly, a well-being destination empowering mothers to thrive with expert content, innovative product solutions and supportive community.