WeSit
Professional babysitters when you need them
After 5 months of being operational, WeSit reached 100 hours of babysitting after having conducted 25 sits.
We've taken an approach of focusing on existing customers rather than scrambling for new customers. We strive to have a few customers that really love us, than a lot who find our service average. To achieve that, our focus is on delivering a 7-star experience for all parents who use our platform.
Most of our time has been spent communicating with parents to understand their needs more, and vetting to find the highest quality sitters to meet those needs.
2/3 of our founders are from Pretoria. It is quite a special moment for us to have confirmed a booking in Pretoria. We took the exact process we followed in expanding to Johannesburg.
An extensive interview process to help us find the best sitters. Begin marketing efforts - and letting our tech and customer management process do the rest.
Our prioritization of scale from the get go has been proving useful!
We expanded to Johannesburg. We were skeptical about launching in a new city. We only knew a few areas in Jo'burg well, but after much discussion and analysis, we came to the conclusion that there was pretty much nothing stopping us in terms of technology, our process, and our level of knowledge about Cape Town vs Jo'burg. We were sure we could deliver the same 7-star service in a different city - the lever is always our people. 7-star babysitters give 7-star sits!
We began interviews in Joburg in early April, and once we had enough sitter density we began marketing in late April. On the 2nd of May, we conducted our first Joburg sit! It went amazingly!
John (shall we call him), a loving father of 2, was the first parent to book a babysitter from our platform. His story was that he wanted to take his wife out for their wedding anniversary dinner.
Their family was situated quite far from where most of our sitters live, but we had a star sitter, let's call her Amy, drive 45 minutes to the family! The sit went super well! Amy arrived early, got to play with the kids, hear about their school and watch TV with them. The couple got to enjoy their anniversary dinner stress free, and came back to happy children!
After spending so much time spent working on technology, it was amazing to be warmed by the very human nature of our service! It's hard to describe it in words!
After much work to on-board and vet the best babysitters in Cape Town, we finally launched to parents, quite timeously on Valentines Day! We were super excited to finally have parents use our platform.
We had a parent we personally knew to try out the website, but her efforts were thrown off by load-shedding (of the country's electricity grid) we had during the time. What awaited us was coming to understand how much hard work we'd have to put in to get our first few customers.
But, our excitement and pride in how far we had come gave us the energy we needed!
Even though technology has caused us to become more efficient and productive workers, we still find ourselves working harder and longer than previous generations. In South Africa, where we host a harsh economy and high unemployment rates, we've seen this to be the case.
Working class parents have unanswered stressed from the effort they put into maintaining financial stability. Over half of their days are occupied by work and work related tasks, which puts them out of sync with their children. Going out for a drink to destress is almost never an option without a babysitter.
We're here to help with that. For ideal development, children need attention, security, supportive caretakers, good role models and unconditional love. We hope to provide for those needs to ensure that both children and parents can continue living their lives ideally and achieve their full potential.
We recently updated our site from Angular 5 to Angular 7. Everything was well and good on the development server - so we decided to deploy the update to live, at a time when traffic was at it's peak.
Only after viewing user interactions on hotjar did we realise the nightmared we had entered, users couldn't log in to the dashboard to manage their profiles. It took our devs about 2 hours to fix what had ended up being a reducer problem where AOT didn't recognize the combination of multiple reducers.
2 Comments
Awesome, congrats!
Are most sits on average 4hrs then? Or are there just some intense outliers?
Also, the focus on existing customers makes a lot of sense in this case. Customers that need babysitting once likely need it again, and by nature, parents interact with other parents, allowing you to likely grow organically via referrals. This is probably something you already realized, though.
Thanks! Correcto, most sits are 3 or 4 hours, leaning more on 3 hours; but we have some outliers - e.g. our longest sit was 10 hours!
And yes, WOM is king given that the whole community is based around trust