Founder Profile: The Childcare Marketplace For The 21st Century

I could say we were motivated by the fact that as moms, my cofounder and I had a ton of personal experience with the pain point — desperately needing a sitter and not being able to easily book someone we could trust. But the real thing that drives both of us is the compulsive need to solve problems when we see them. We saw this huge gap in the market — the need for an on-demand childcare solution that parents could trust — and it drove us crazy that none of the “incumbents” like Care.com, UrbanSitter or SitterCity were even trying to address it. I was a business lawyer before we started Nanno, and Desi is an amazing software engineer who’s spent her career building products for other people. As moms, we know the problem. And as professional problem-solvers, we are deeply driven to solve it.

Nanno is an on-demand app for booking amazing sitters. Our users describe us like Uber or Lyft, but for booking a sitter.

There are two main things. First, we’re the only national platform that lets parents enter the details about the care they need, hit “Book Now,” and be quickly matched with a great sitter who’s available when and where the parent needs them. Second, in order to match parents with sitters on demand, we had to build a very comprehensive vetting process, so we could make sure all sitters on Nanno are all great. Our vetting process is what enables us to provide on-demand booking, and we think it makes Nanno the safest way to book a sitter, whether online or offline.

There are two things we get all the time. The first is “Oh my goodness, it worked!” — when a new user sees the message come through that a sitter has picked up their booking and is engaged. Usually that happens within 15 minutes, and it always surprises people the first time. The second thing we hear is, “I’m so glad I found you! I’ve been looking for something like this forever!”

Based on our market analysis, we estimate that no more than 10% of all babysitting is currently booked through a digital platform. The rest is booked entirely offline. We don’t think this is by choice — it’s because until Nanno, there wasn’t a technology solution that really worked.

This is a great question, and one I love to answer. We’re doing with babysitting what Uber did with ride-hailing — taking something that is currently a huge hassle and a universally bad experience and making it easy and even fun. As millennials become parents (they currently make up 80% of new parents), they’re looking for digital solutions to their parenting needs. Nanno is the intuitive on-demand app they’re looking for. And when booking a sitter is easy, people do it more. We’ve already seen people using Nanno to do a bunch of things they wouldn’t have done before — booking sitters to supervise kids at parties, booking sitters while they’re traveling, booking sitters to provide on-site childcare at conferences and events, even booking “after-bedtime” sitters so parents can go out for a few hours when their kids are asleep. (That last one is my personal favorite.) We see a lot of market-expanding potential — and the market for sitters is already enormous!

It’s super simple. Parents use the app to tell us when and where they need care, the number of kids, their ages, etc. We broadcast the booking request to all sitters in the area who meet the parents’ requirements, and the first sitter to reply that they can do it is instantly engaged. The sitter calls the parent to confirm the details — and if the parent isn’t happy with the sitter they’ve been matched with after that, they can cancel without penalty. Assuming all is good, the sitter completes the engagement, and afterward payment is processed automatically.

The number of people actively searching for sitters online is on the rise, as demonstrated by Google’s “trend” reports. We employ a number of different marketing strategies to get the word out to parents and caregivers, and after that, our technology does the rest.

We have two revenue models — commission-based and subscription-based. Under our free subscription, parents don’t pay any up-front cost, but a commission is built into the hourly rate they pay for sitters. Under our optional premium subscription, parents pay $29.99 per month and then the hourly rate they pay for sitters does not include our commission. We estimate that we will be profitable at a business level when we have about 100,000 parent users. At the same time, we intend to continue to invest in growth, so we’re not targeting profitability on a business level, but rather profitability on a unit-economics level. At this point, we already have profitable unit economics, meaning we earn more from a user in the first year than it costs to acquire that user.

Because this market — and the family tech industry in general — is so under-served, there are few obvious strategic acquisition opportunities at this time. We anticipate that there will emerge a clear “winner” in this category in the next few years. We hope to be that winner, and if we are, we will likely exit via IPO. If we are not, we will likely exit by acquisition to whomever that clear winner is. Either way, our objective right now is to build Nanno into a valuable asset for our users, our investors and the world.