Growth Child

Delia and Jeff lacked a ready support network. Delia's mother, Marilla, was fully occupied nursing her partner, Gavan, who had been diagnosed with a brain tumour on the day that Meg was born. Jeff's family lived in the United States. It was a very tough time. Delia says: "We couldn't find anyone. It seemed like all our friends were also asking, ‘Do you know a good babysitter?'"

Eventually Delia and Jeff found a good babysitter (she had advertised herself by sticking a small note in the window of an Albert Park milk bar). But it struck Delia that if she was prepared to follow up an anonymous ad, there must be many other parents in the same situation. She assembled a list of the names and phone numbers of the babysitters she knew about and soon friends were ringing her for referrals. "I thought, ‘There needs to be some way for people to find babysitters, without stealing their friends' contacts'."

Jeff, an IT consultant, found a possible solution on the homepage of the Star Tribune, a newspaper from his hometown of Minneapolis, Minnesota. It offered an online introduction site for babysitting services. Delia says: "We thought it was a great concept."

Delia and Jeff began developing the concept into a business plan and dealing with the core problem: how to market the website as a trustworthy source of babysitting. Delia says that parents who she spoke to about the idea of online babysitting introductions were wary. "No one had heard of it before."

The Challenge

To establish a market for the website.

The Solution

The couple's first idea was to offer profiles of babysitters, segmented into times when they were available to work. Customers would read the profiles and email the ones they liked via the website.

To find "content" for the website - babysitters - Delia traipsed around various Melbourne universities talking with departments of early childhood education and nursing, which she figured might have students interested in babysitting. She found the departmental heads were keen to co-operate with a program that would offer their students employment. Delia left fliers and bookmarks advertising the website with career counsellors.

Australian Catholic University was particularly helpful, she says. They sent Delia's email seeking babysitters through their student database. "I used some guerrilla marketing, too." Delia identified places where students congregated, such as libraries and cafes, and left posters and fliers there. Babysitters were invited to register their details and a short profile of themselves.

Delia's fancy footwork secured about 200 Melbourne-based babysitters before the site was launched. Within months, however, the couple were stunned to find that babysitters were also registering from Sydney and Brisbane. They hadn't anticipated that the site would go national by itself. So Delia flew to both cities and visited schools and colleges like those in Melbourne that were good sources of babysitting talent.    

Marketing the website on a shoestring budget to parents was a challenge. Initially, Delia used three methods:

• Networking - She met with parents through groups such as mothers' groups, playgroups, and kindergartens and talked about their babysitting needs.
  
  
• Viral marketing - She emailed the site's launch details to friends and contacts and asked them to send it on to their networks of friends and colleagues.
  
  
• Search engine marketing - She paid about $600 per month for the first six months of the web site to search engines such as Google in order to be ranked first in the list of search results for babysitters.
  
  

The site launched in July 2005 and it took off rapidly, breaking even after six months. But there was a steady flow of feedback from people who wanted more from the site. Delia carefully logged all comments and analysed them. "I would think, ‘What is the issue here: lack of carers at specific locations, unusual requirements, something else?"

After six months, a pattern emerged. The problem related to why Delia and Jeff had set up the business in the first place: they wanted babysitting for pre-schoolers; Delia's analysis showed a pattern within the feedback that indicated a need for more daytime and after-school carers.

Keeping the log was a good way to track customers' demands. Delia found that 40% of customers wanted nannies, 40% wanted after-school care and only 20% wanted a babysitter. "We'd really built the whole site around a very simple ‘babysitting' concept. But we found that there was this whole other area that we needed to address. It seems so obvious now, but at the time we'd only seen a small part of the market."

Delia upgraded the site, introducing an after-school-care column to go alongside the two existing babysitter profiles columns, which indicated day and / or night availability. "Many of our competitors copied us on that, but we were the first to think of it." (Within six months of launching the website, the business had two competitors; now there are six.) Delia says: "Being the first mover was important for us."

By July 2006, Delia had also introduced job postings, allowing parents to advertise directly to carers. This innovation worked particularly well for parents who were struggling to match a babysitter with their daytime schedules. As babysitters are often juggling several jobs and university, job postings help the babysitters to find convenient slots rather than parents having to read through all the available babysitters' ads.

By June 2007, Delia had 3,737  active babysitters registered and by July 2008 there were 5,975. An ‘active' babysitter is someone who is actively logging in and is available. Altogether, more than 25,000 babysitters have registered with the site since it began.

The website does not vet the babysitters who register with it. The site clearly states that the selection of babysitters is parents' sole responsibility and that it acts only as an introductory service. But the site provides tools to help parents screen applicants, such as interview guidelines and suggested threshold requirements, such as a police check. It also provides a ratings system, which allows parents to share feedback about carers they have used (similar to the eBay concept). Once a customer and babysitter(s) have connected, they deal with each other directly.

Parents pay a one-off subscription fee that allows them to access the site for a specified time: three months or 12 months. A customer may interview as many babysitters as they wish during their subscription period. A basic three-month subscription ($49.95) allows customers to send emails to babysitters on the site. The premium All Carers option ($79.95) offers add-ons such as job postings, the opportunity to email all carers online and features like My Shortlist and My Comments. Customers can pay more to extend the subscription period.

Many customers renew their subscription when the need arises such as when a babysitter's availability no longer matches the customer's needs. Delia says that many babysitters become less available in the year they turn 21 as their Saturday nights are filled with a plethora of 21st birthday parties.

The website doesn't take a cut from the babysitter's fee; nor does the site raise revenue from advertising (yet). "We don't want to bombard people with pop-up ads."

Most marketing dollars are now spent on pay-per-click campaigns. "We continue to put money into areas that deliver results." The cost of search engine marketing with Google, for instance, has increased to "the equivalent of a full-time sales person", which repays itself in customers, and is affordable due to the profitability of the website. The business pays for its selection of search terms and about $1.00 every time a customer clicks onto the site, regardless of whether the customer buys a subscription or not.

Find a Babysitter also advertises in national magazines for parents with children and does some PR by offering sponsorships and freebies to kindergartens and schools for fundraisers. Delia says: "Word of mouth has been a phenomenal way of marketing the site. Women are so good at supporting each other and spreading the word about handy sites like mine." 

Upgrading the site to include the after-school care option and job postings was relatively easy and cost-efficient thanks to Jeff's IT expertise. He re-coded the site to include the new options over several weeks. "It didn't really cost anything, except in time."

Delia and Jeff are delighted with their results. "We've had phenomenal growth and the business just keeps growing. We went away for a few weeks recently and I was able to run the business remotely. We are so fortunate to have a business like this which is so flexible that it can be run from any location."

The Results

The number of parent subscribers increased by 77% between June 2006 and July 2008, from 4,828 to 8,558. Delia says: "We've had 30% year-on-year-growth."

Each upgrade to the website has had an immediate impact on the bottom-line. Allowing customers to post their own job listings for a premium has been a winner. "We were able to increase our prices the minute we rolled out the changes."

Customers seem happy too. Delia says: "We did a customer survey this year in August and 88.8% of respondents said they found what they were looking for on our site."

Find a Babysitter won the 2008 National Telstra Business Award for Micro-businesses. It was recognition that added to Delia's inner satisfaction. "I love it that our business helps people."

Author Credits