You may remember advertising your babysitting services on local bulletin boards or light poles around town but now there’s a more sophisticated way to go about it thanks to Genevieve Thiers. In college, she started a business from her dorm room connecting parents and babysitters with $120 her father loaned her for the domain registration. Sittercity.com now has over one million registered caregivers and 70 full-time employees working to help them connect with parents in need.
The inception of the babysitting website came when Thiers observed a pregnant woman struggle up flights of stairs to post fliers for a babysitter. “Gosh, this should be so much easier,” Thiers thought. “Why can’t someone just put all the caregivers in the country or the city together in one place?”
“Today, Sittercity.com has over a million registered caregivers, makes a parent/sitter match every 3 minutes, and is used by the US government and millions of eager mommies in search of that special sitter,” according to Yahoo. During the first few years, Thiers did all the leg work herself, posting 20,000 fliers in the Boston area.
“When I first pitched Sittercity to investors I was laughed out of the rooms. One guy went so far as to tell me that his wife handles that,” said Thiers. “Babysitting is not some small women’s problem that we should be dealing with on our own, it’s a billion dollar industry. I just knew it was going to work.”
And work it did. Thiers eventually did get $5 million in investments and the rest is history. She’s now spreading her reach even further, co-founding three other companies with “new emergent women leaders.”
“My big mission personally is to get more women CEOs into tech companies and to accelerate those tech companies past a million in yearly revenues,” Thiers said. “Many other women or moms out there that are thinking of starting a company, I want them to know that it’s not only possible, that there’s a huge opportunity there for them.”
(via Yahoo, image by Andrew Campbell)
