The Babysitting Club is now live! After much thinking, talking, effort, late nights and input from a special, hand-picked beta test group (you know who you are - thanks so much) it's up.
What you see is the base functionality. But over the next six months there will be much, much more added. I'll share some of the ideas via this blog, and seek your input on my ideas (and your own) too.
Please do post your thoughts here if you have any questions or suggestions...
Enjoy... http://www.babysittingclub.co.nz/
Saturday, October 20, 2007
Friday, October 19, 2007
Why?
So why choose to implement my idea of an online Babysitting Club, you ask? It's a long story. It all started like this...
After the arrival of my first child, we met plenty of great people in similar situations - their social lives went from fab to drab. The year before becoming a parent I saw 24 movies (including Run Lola Run - a particular fav). The year after I saw 2 (and I can't remember what they were, of course). That summarises it succinctly.
So I vowed that I'd start up a babysitting club amongst our friends - just like my parents had done in the 70's. But I found the time and effort to research good models and implement the best one was too great for a new parent. So then I forgot about the idea.
Over time we struck up bi-lateral agreements with other families to have a reciprocal arrangement. We'd sit for them one week and they'd sit for us in return the week later. But these arrangements often failed too. Mainly because our frequency of need for a sitter didn't match with them - I call it the "Supply and Demand and Demand and Supply" paradigm. Well, I do now that I've blogged about it.
Anyway...then I got back to thinking of the babysitting club. Solving the one-on-one issue, it allows you to spread the 'burden' over more families and increases your chance of a demand being met with a supply(er). And I remembered that I was in IT, and that IT is the answer to all problems :). Then I got excited (for about 60 seconds) about implementing a 'shared' spreadsheet between families to manage the balances. But after those 60 seconds I remembered the Internet - the solution to (almost) all real-time, any-time problems. And then I thought that the difference in effort to create it for our group of friends to use, and the effort to create it for any number of people to use was not large...
And now, here I am. Many hours later, I've created a Babysitting Club for me and the world to use.
After the arrival of my first child, we met plenty of great people in similar situations - their social lives went from fab to drab. The year before becoming a parent I saw 24 movies (including Run Lola Run - a particular fav). The year after I saw 2 (and I can't remember what they were, of course). That summarises it succinctly.
So I vowed that I'd start up a babysitting club amongst our friends - just like my parents had done in the 70's. But I found the time and effort to research good models and implement the best one was too great for a new parent. So then I forgot about the idea.
Over time we struck up bi-lateral agreements with other families to have a reciprocal arrangement. We'd sit for them one week and they'd sit for us in return the week later. But these arrangements often failed too. Mainly because our frequency of need for a sitter didn't match with them - I call it the "Supply and Demand and Demand and Supply" paradigm. Well, I do now that I've blogged about it.
Anyway...then I got back to thinking of the babysitting club. Solving the one-on-one issue, it allows you to spread the 'burden' over more families and increases your chance of a demand being met with a supply(er). And I remembered that I was in IT, and that IT is the answer to all problems :). Then I got excited (for about 60 seconds) about implementing a 'shared' spreadsheet between families to manage the balances. But after those 60 seconds I remembered the Internet - the solution to (almost) all real-time, any-time problems. And then I thought that the difference in effort to create it for our group of friends to use, and the effort to create it for any number of people to use was not large...
And now, here I am. Many hours later, I've created a Babysitting Club for me and the world to use.
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