For parents under the illusion they still have a social life, finding a babysitter is a continual battle against the forces of flaky teenagers, competing families and the sneaking suspicion that your little darlings might be introduced to any number of unsavory things as soon as you shut the front door. But trumping all those concerns, is that when you need a babysitter so you can go to a last-minute reunion of Hüsker Dü, you need them right now.
In the age of smartphones and social networking, booking babysitters is still mostly a throwback, requiring phone work upfront and cash on the backend. Startup UrbanSitter is bringing babysitting into the iPhone era, even offering that babysitting miracle – the option to find someone to watch your kids at the last minute. The San Francisco-based startup helps parents find, book, and pay for a babysitter online, and helps sitters find work that fits their schedule. On Monday, UrbanSitter announced it has raised $6 million from Canaan Partners and existing investors.
Knowing how hard it can be to leave your bundle of joy with a complete stranger, UrbanSitter looks for sitters recommended and booked by friends and family, using Facebook Connect. When parents sign up for the free service, they can indicate where their kids go to school and whether they belong to parents' groups or community organizations, such as a church or little league team, which helps UrbanSitter find sitters recommended by a parent's social group. "Who you leave your kids with is a big trust issue; that's why we use Facebook Connect to find sitters recommended by people you know," says UrbanSitter co-founder and CEO Lynn Perkins.
Once parents decide they need someone to look after their kids, they can browse through sitters in their area and narrow down search results based on the sitter's age, education level, and if they have any specialty experience or training, such as CPR or working with disabled kids. Each sitter's profile includes a brief description about themselves, their age and years of experience working with kids, a photo, and their hourly rate. Most profiles include the sitter's average response time, how many families have hired the sitter more than once, and if they have other Facebook friends who babysit as well.
Inspired by OpenTable's approach for restaurant reservations, Perkins decided to make online booking a key feature of UrbanSitter. If you find a sitter you like, you can send a booking request for a specific time and date. That sitter will get an e-mail or notification in UrbanSitter's app about the request. If he or she is available and interested, they can accept the job and you'll have someone to watch your kids.
If you're desperate for a sitter tonight, you can post a request to UrbanSitter's job board. Any available sitter can apply for the job, and in San Francisco, says Perkins, you'll begin getting responses within half an hour. UrbanSitter is in a dozen other markets, including Boston, Chicago, and Los Angeles, and response times can vary for last-minute jobs.
When you book a sitter, you'll know upfront how much the night of babysitting will cost you, based on the sitter's hourly rate. Once the job is done, UrbanSitter asks the sitter and the parents to confirm that the job was performed. Parents can pay with cash, or the much more popular option, says Perkins, credit card. Instead of taking a cut of the sitter's earnings, UrbanSitter charges the parents a flat $7.50 service charge.
Since launching in July 2011, the site has grown to around 28,000 members (both parents and sitters). In September 2012, UrbanSitter launched an iOS app, so parents can book sitters and sitters can respond to requests while they're out.
There may be hope for an adult social life yet. Whether that means you should recreate your stage-diving youth is a question for your chiropractor.
