essentialmom.com

Like many other Bedford moms, Gretchen Menzies wakes up at 7 a.m. to get her kids ready for school, make peanut butter-and-jelly sandwiches, and then walk her boys, who are 5 and 8, to the bus stop. But between slices of bread and gobs of toothpaste, Menzies is almost always punching away at her BlackBerry, answering the steady influx of e-mails she gets regarding her website, EssentialMom.com. There are advertisers who want to get into her weekly newsletter, nonprofits with updates on upcoming events, and readers who e-mail her just to say they appreciate the advice she had posted on the site about raising kids-- advice usually gleaned from her own experience.

The inspiration for EssentialMom came in 2000, after Menzies had lived in Westchester for a few years. She was the first of her friends in the city to get married, the first to move to the suburbs, and the first to have children-- so she found that, as her friends joined her in Westchester, she kept relaying a lot of the same information about swimming pools and play groups. And so: EssentialMom was born, as a website and a free, e-mail newsletter covering Westchester. Menzies also links moms to local activities and stores, generating cash by mixing in paid advertisements with the editorial content and ad banners on the site.

This May, she launched EssentialMom 2.0, giving the site an overhaul and adding more interactive features, such as blogging, user-generated restaurant reviews, and discussion forums-- all for a cost of $20,000, and some headaches and challenges along the way.

The site is running smoothly now, but success sometimes comes at a cost, and Menzies admits she's more or less addicted to the business. Wile her husband relaxes by gathering eggs from the chicken coop on their small farm, she has no other hobbies, she says "I'm obsessed, I'll admit it."