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Trusted Child Care - Babysitters & Nannies — Better Child Care
Trusted is the fastest and most convenient way for busy parents to find a vetted, high quality caregiver for their children. Trusted's caregivers are interviewed, onboarded, trained and W-2 employed by Trusted. Using Trusted's app, parents can vide live video, geolocate their provide and message with their provider.
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Niraj Pant
Love the product, looks really well thought-out :)
BTW, Go Illini @_skryl_!
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Exciting to see Trusted on ProductHunt. My wife and I have been using the service for the past few months, and the quality of care providers is exceptionally high. So far we have booked 13 different child care providers, and they all have been great. Our concern of rotating sitters has quickly turned into a feature where our son doesn't get attached to a single person.
@andrewwarner Yes, done - sorry about that Andrew. We algorithmically vet parents who signup as well. Custom domains tend to pose an issue at times however.
@ai Thanks, Anand! I should really go out with my wife at least once a week or once every other week. This will help. I don't trust other services. I think the way you set things up addresses a lot of the issues I had with other services. I like the vetting process you have.
@andrewwarner Yes, you should :) Before Viv & I started working on Trusted, we were noodling an idea we called "Bliss" - a datenight app for married couples. The thesis was marital happiness, but after some testing we learned that if we fixed finding child care, we'd be solving the crux of the problem. I started to write about (marital) happiness a bit last year: http://techcrunch.com/2015/04/04...
Hello Product Hunt Community!
Trusted was born after some frustrating experiences my wife and I had in finding child care for our daughter. We wanted to build a service, powered by technology, that tackled not just discovery but also eased scheduling and payments. Having built a marketplace before, I know that there is no silver bullet to building trust - so we wanted to offer features during a booking that could aid in helping parents feel at ease - like being able to check-in using a live video stream, or being able to geolocate your provider.
We're also one of the only child care marketplaces to (W-2) employ all our providers, most of who are nursing students. We vet them thoroughly by interviewing them in-person, background checking them, ensuring they are immunized and checking their references. We also meet with them periodically (btw, they all have Slack accounts!)
More about our journey here: https://medium.com/@ai/better-ch...
And we’ll be around all day to answer any questions you may have. Thank you!
@ai Finally, an app that could actually positively impact my life.
How doe the live video work?
@andrewwarner hey Andrew! When a parent makes a booking, they are prompted to opt-in to the live video. If they opt-in, our providers will then setup their phones in an area at the parent's home (only at home, not if they are out and about) with a fisheye lens that we provide to them. The goal would be to place it in a location where the phone can capture as much as possible. They then power up the app, start recording, the secure live stream hits our backend, and is consumed by the parent app. It's analogous to dropcam in a lot of senses.
I have been using Trusted since my daughter was a newborn -- now she's almost 9 months old. It's been a lifesaver for me. As a new parent without any family nearby to help me, having Trusted in my back pocket has given me at tremendous sense of security. I've used it when we wanted a date night, when my husband has gone out of town and I needed an extra set of hands, and when my nanny got sick and I needed someone last minute to cover for her. All the providers are excellent and are better with my daughter than I am.
I like this. My mother has ran a daycare for over a decade, and I have wanted to do something like this but never did it. Thank you for this, nice work!
Anand, I have been following you on Instagram and elsewhere for quite a long time. Was bit apprehensive when you unveiled your startup. But you have executed it well. So congratulations.
Curious to know your future plans. I am sure you had thought this out, but if not just putting it out here. I would have used this when my kids were an infant. At this point, I have a totally different requirement. I want an uber for the babysitter or A Tinder for a babysitter. An OnDemand app. I can call a teenager, preferably in my neighborhood,(it is important that they should be just a few blocks away so I can give them a ride back to their home. ) and charges approx 10$. They just need to be at the house and be a noninvasive presence for the puppy or the kids. Hang around and watch movies. Open the door for a pizza delivery and sort.
Next year my son will be 13 and will be ready to serve my neighborhood for such impromptu babysitting calls. He would love to save money for his new skis next year.
It is totally outside your realm right now. Your target market is the parents of these business savvy teenagers. Your background checks and interview process have to scale to include the parents of the teenagers too. I would love to have such an app. I will be both a customer and, through my son, a provider as well.
@rptony Hey Ranjith, good to connect! First and foremost, nothing precludes our solution from being on-demand. Today, in SF, you can book a provider with a lead time of 2 hours. It's 2 hours and not minutes because, unlike other services, our providers require some preparation and legwork before they can provide care, which is a multi-hour task (average of 4 hours today) as opposed to just dropping something or someone off.
As for the age of the provider, it is certainly something we've thought about, but our primary demographic today are new parents with children under the age of 5 (for the most part). It gives them (my wife and I included) a great deal of comfort knowing that our providers are background checked, immunized, CPR certified, and that they have at least 3 years of child care experience, etc. These are hard to produce with someone much younger. We wanted to set the bar high with nursing students and excellent quality of service, so that when we do open up the market we have a benchmark that we can look up to.
I'm dubious about the $10 though ;)
25$ is way too high in the market (suburbs of Boston). Here an average rate of a professional babysitter is around 15$. Teenage babysitter, (they are more of a house sitter than an actual babysitter) charges 8-10$. I understand the quality factor. Good luck!
@rptony That is our SF Bay Area pricing - we will localize our pricing. Although $8 is below minimum wage in Boston, IIRC, just FYI.
Another sphere Uberized. Love it! But please don't forget about Android parents. They are parents too :)
Great Idea! How do you plan to extend the service to other locations? Who will check and talk with a potential babysitter?
Do you have a way to protect a babysitter by collecting data about families?
@olgalanova Hi Olga, we've been looking at our demand and activity from various cities as well as how best we can match supply in those cities. And our plans to expand primarily depends on how best we can tee up our providers there before we can ensure they are able to start working. As for vetting the providers in other cities, we will do that ourselves - we take pride (and a great deal of comfort) in meeting with our providers in-person. Granted this is hard to do at scale, but we have an idea to fix that - one we've already implemented here in the SF Bay Area (some secret sauce here :)
As for data collection - our providers are our employees. When they get hired, they sign an employment contract with us that prohibits them from collecting and storing any such PII on their personal devices. Our privacy policy also clearly states that any PII we collect is used to ensure that we can provide the best quality care. Net-net: our providers are trained to provide excellent care. Aside from that, we ask that they follow parents' lead and only do what parents are comfortable with. More about our privacy policy here: https://www.usetrusted.com/privacy
