App matches babysitters with parents
You have tickets to the National Arts Centre and your babysitter texts to say she has the flu, what do you do?
Three young Ottawa entrepreneurs have solved that, and comparable dilemmas, by creating a free mobile app that connects parents with babysitters.
Earl Of March students Andrea Herscovich, Jenny Shen and Jenny Hua, all 17 years old, co-founded SitterNextDoor (web address is yoursitternextdoor.com) after they entered a project in Technovation Ottawa in 2016. The contest, designed to introduce young people to entrepreneurship and coding, invites teams of girls to solve real-world problems through technology.
The group, who all took business courses during high school, drew on Herscovich’s family’s experience to create the concept for the online platform.
“My mom was having trouble finding a babysitter for me and my brothers when we were younger, so we decided to make an app that would help with that, matching parents and babysitters who live in the same neighbourhood,” said Herscovich, who says she’s happy she began entrepreneurship at a young age and already has future projects in mind.
The group won first place in the competition and went on to set up a company and further develop their app with the help of a small grant from Carleton University’s “Lead To Win” entrepreneurship program. Since then they have been working with a mentor at the Bayview Yards innovation hub to create the platform, to be launched May 26.
To use the app, users must create an online profile. For example, sitters provide information such as the age and gender of the children they would like to babysit, price and location; parents do the same, including the date they ’d like the sitter to work, and include any additional information the sitter would need to know. All this information is private. While they hope the app will help teenagers find work, they say they ’re open to babysitters of any age.
To ensure safety, the team consulted the Ottawa police. It was suggested babysitters be required to provide three letters of recommendation, and that parents provide identification and a police background check if one has already been done.
The app is free for the users, so the developers draw a small fee for each transaction. “Our revenue model is similar to Uber, so we would take a transaction fee ... and then, when the parents pay us, we take the cut and pay the babysitter,” said Hua.
SitterNextDoor will be launched at the Great Glebe Garage Sale on Saturday, at the corner of Powell Avenue and Lyon Street.
Herscovich says many parents are eager to build a roster of sitters, especially for those times when they are stuck with a last-minute cancellation.
“Some parents say, ‘My kids are 20 now, I wish there was something like this when they were young,’” said Herscovich. “So we know that there’s a market there. We also see a lot of people commenting on Facebook groups saying, ‘I need a babysitter in a couple of hours, can you recommend anyone?’”