A question: What annoys you about finding childcare?

I don't see the advantage to me of seeing which of my friends uses a service. To me, the advantage of FB is all on the side of the service.

'Seeing reviews my friends have left' -- I don't live my life on FB and neither do my friends. We don't conduct our relationships via FB or reveal minutiae of our lives there. We call or text or talk.

I don't leave reviews. I have looked through some of my friends' pages just to see what sort of services along your lines any of them seem to have used or left reviews for and I came up completely empty handed. This is not because there is an untapped market. It is because those who have a busy socialising schedule have had their babysitting sorted since they first had babies, and those who just go out occasionally borrow other people's babysitters. Also, they are all aged mid 30s to 50ish and definitely have disposable income, and children, but prefer not to advertise or hint at the extent of the income or their lifestyle -- so you won't find reviews of the gardening services or the cleaners or the house painting services, etc. that they use. The only hint at social status you will see is references to their children's sports teams.

What's to stop parents booking the babysitter direct at a future date?
Paying a monthly registration fee encouraged parents to use sitters.
With you they could use you as a recourse only when nannies you had previously introduced were busy.

Miterra stop spamming the forum with your messages. You didn't read the fine print which is oversight on your part. Accept it and move on.

Apologies Lonecatwithkitten I got your name wrong there

Your market for repeat users would be older and well off and possibly professional, and would most likely not have the same attitude or user habits wrt FB that you do, at age 27. I am almost twice your age and in a similar position to LoneKitten. My DCs who are young professionals (in their early 20s at the moment) keep a very low social media profile too, with an eye to the image they project to employers and potential employers. If they had children, their income would put them in your target market.

Childcare arrangements are not part of my life any more, but if they were and I were considering using your service, the FB login would put me off. I am nodding at LK's description of her FB postings as 'bland' and posted with an eye to my image. I do not plaster details of my personal life there at all, and I make absolutely no reference to my children, and post no photos of them.

Hi,
I wanted to warn people about findababysitter.com - I thought I was paying to use it for a month and discovered they'd been taking £25 a month out of my bank account. They are refusing to refund this, even though they agree I didn't use the site outside of the one month I paid for.
They claim their terms and conditions made clear it was a monthly subscription but I know I wouldn't have agreed to it if I had seen that this was the deal.
I feel completely scammed! Just wanted to make sure no one else has the same experience.
Cheers,
M

May make more sense to login with google account so can integrate with google calendar.
Probably better having options, so those who want to use social logins can but no one is forced to do so.

Very, very easy if you remain logged in for someone else to post something to your Facebook page am I intrinsically linked to my business and reputation is everything in my business.
Everything I ever post to Facebook is bland and could never ever reflect badly on my reputation.
Facebook can be amazing for businesses, but it can kill then dead as fast as it can make them. As I say my friends and I are your target audience and I am probably the biggest Facebook user of everyone I know.
Yes under 30s probably will happily log in through Facebook, but they are likely to be your one of users. Over 30 professional people are your most likely regulars these are the people whose opinions you need to follow.
95% of the people who follow my Business Facebook page are under 25, this from my research is similar for most businesses.

I'm 25 and hate it when things ask me to log in with Facebook. I have not used some otherwise great services because they want to link with my Facebook account. I would absolutely not log in with my Facebook account as either a babysitter or a parent to use this kind of service.
It's not an age thing. It's a common sense thing.

I am 42, a business owner and very aware that one false move on Facebook could have a massive adverse impact on my business.
I would suspect I am representative of your target audience in terms of age and income.

I use Facebook a bit, but generally my peers who are similar age similar income also would not log in to a service through Facebook.

Social media logins are very, very traceable in particular Facebook gradually erodes privacy settings. I would not want to risk the possibility that me booking a baby sitter could be tracked. I don't remained logged in to anything, good on line safety is logging out of every account every time to prevent misuse of your account.

And may I add on the subject of logging in, I would not want to have to log into a service via FB or any other social media. I like to keep the various online aspects of my life separate from each other and my privacy settings are set as high as I can make them everywhere.

I wouldn't use a service as I prefer to hear from people I know and whose children I know how a certain babysitter does her job. Most people I know who are parents have some sort of network they are in contact with when it comes to finding sitters, and they find them through either through nursery or CMs or au pairs or nannies they know or that their friends or their relatives know.

The first babysitter I ever had was a student who was the granddaughter of an older lady I knew. She worked out ok. I hired her maybe three times over the course of two years. Next babysitter was a 13 yo neighbour whom I first asked to sit when I was rushing to the hospital to have DD2. She worked out fine too. I hired her a few more times. The next babysitters were (1) a niece of a neighbour and then her younger sister when she went off to university, (2) an older sister of a friend of DD1's, (3) a teenage boy from across the alley whom I knew from the DCs' school, (4) DD1 took it from there..

Part time babysitting where the sitter can take a job or leave it as she wishes in a lot of cases is not going to pay enough to warrant a fee to an agency to find the jobs. Those babysitters who are serious about making money four nights a week or more would also most likely have their own network established via nurseries or some other pipeline, or via established client families in their own local area referring them to others. By the same token, if you wanted to work four nights a week or more you could work in a restaurant. You wouldn't necessarily be stuck working a morning shift one week and an evening shift the next. Some places hire staff specifically for different shifts.

Local jobs are preferable to many sitters because nobody wants to be at the mercy of parents or public transport at odd hours to take them home, and some would have qualms about safety and also cost of taxis, or parking, or walking in certain unfamiliar neighbourhoods. So therefore many sitters who are serious about making money or who prefer the odd casual request only cast their nets in their own locality and get work by word of mouth, avoiding agency fees that way too. Babysitting doesn't pay a huge amount so costs that would get in the way of taking home the maximum you can would be a turnoff imo -- transport, parking, and agency fees.