A Babysitting Club - For The World

Form versus Function

2008-03-06T22:59:00.002+13:00

If you've navigated the Good Friends Babysitting Club site, you may have noticed that there isn't a flash, stylie Web2.0 user interface. I hope you're not too disappointed by this.

There's a couple of reasons for this. And I'll be brutally honest in sharing them with you:

1. I focussed on function in designing and creating the site. The majority of time I've spent on the site has been on designing the functionlity. I felt there was no point having a swish user interface with weak, bug-riddled functions.
2. I set out on the development of the functions in "vanilla" HTML pages. There was no colour or formatting. I just cranked out the functionlity. In fact, even in my most intense testing phase, the style hadn't been introduced.
3. My website style ability is not the greatest.

This is not to say that the website will look as it does today for the rest of its electronic life. I do intend to smarten up the site after its first anniversary. Heck, I might even make it look all Web2.0.

But I do believe that functionality comes first and form follows. You'll need to have become a member and logged on in order to make your own assessment of the value of the functionlity versus the lack of fancy form - all the site's best function is 'hidden' behind the logon screen.

I like what Andrew Ingram says about form versus function. And I like to think that my site is sitting somewhere above the red line on the right-hand side of the form v function graph.

What do you think?

Snowball nucleus update

2008-02-29T23:05:00.004+13:00

The site can now modestly boast 10 active groups and 21 active members!

And the first user-requested enhancement has just been made - now when you submit a request to join an existing group, that group's coordinator will receive an email prompting them to log on and approve (or reject) the membership request.

Thanks for your suggestion Jenny!

Enhancement Request #1

2008-02-28T00:32:00.007+13:00

A request for enhancement from Jenny: "...would it be possible to be sent an email when someone requests to join the group so I know to go online and accept them. I check my email quite regularly and this would be easier than logging on to the website to check."

Great feedback, thanks!

I had to check...as I was sure the site already did this - but no, it doesn't. I'll work on this as a priority. I'll also add a post in the next month or so with a list of possible enhancements and look to you, the users, for feedback on which ones you want most (via this blog).

Watch this space...

The Last Three Months

2008-02-09T22:12:00.000+13:00

Since my last post I've realised my expectation that word of the website would spread by "viral marketing" (VM) was naive.

I thought that a great idea, a website that implements it well and a topic that is discussed by the members of the target audience with other members of the same audience almost everytime they go out together (babysitting) - the site's popularity would feed itself. But...no...and it's obvious to me now...marketing was never my strong point.

The Babysitting Club website is a great service that will be popular - so I have one of the vital ingredients for VM to work. But no one has ever successfully created the rolling snowball (the one that grows in size as it rolls down the hill) without first forming the nucleus of crushed snow themselves.

I realised I need to create a critical mass, a nucleus of people who use and believe in the website before the VM factor might kick in. But my marketing budget was $zero - so I fished around for some free coverage. I was surprised how many options were available to me but also quite surprised at how many options (that I thought would be free) were not free.

Little Treasures Magazine picked up my story and were very encouraging of the idea. They ran a small item about the site in their Feb/Mar 08 issue (see page 59). Full credit to Little Treasures for being supportive and generous in running the story for me. The hits on the site have picked up greatly as a result!

The site can now modestly boast 5 active groups and 13 active members!

One group has been particularly active with 6 sitting events at a total of 27.75 sitting hours. That's what I like to see - parents getting out more!

The group and member numbers are small, but it's a start...now back to my nucleus-forming marketing activities...

Launched at last

2007-10-20T14:09:00.000+13:00

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/

Why?

2007-10-19T17:30:00.000+13:00

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.

Implementing Business Ideas

2007-09-26T22:29:00.000+12:00

I work in IT. I like to think my career is progressing along the 'software development life cycle'. That's the same life cycle that I've tread for the last 18 years. Where a software development project may complete after several iterations through that life cycle, a career is never 'complete' and the life cycle iterations differ from a project's. But I still like the concept of a career-oriented SDLC.

Before I started my life of bits and bytes, I got educated. This took various forms. School, school holiday work, a part-time shop job on campus, holidays, travel, family, friends, family friends, even some teachers! At Varsity I set up a unit trust with a mate and made a little bit of money (before Black Monday). I sold out in early Oct 1987. My mate, Matt, bragged to me about being worth 30K on paper and being able to afford an Alpha (before Black Monday). He needed a loan (to buy some shares - before Black Monday) so I wrote up a loan document at 27% interest pa (part-profitering because he wasn't needing it for food or text books...part-payback for him sneezing directly in my face 'for fun' in High School).

Since the mid-80s, I've come up what I believed to be good business ideas. Probably a dozen in total. None of them would make me a millionaire, but good all the same.

I never implemented one of them.

Google 'Implementing business ideas' and you'll get 6,920,000 hits. There's plenty of people out there willing to help you do it - so why haven't I done it? I'm conservative. I don't yet fully get the idea of spending money to make money. Implementing it involved more than just my time. I had no time. I got negative feedback from my sound-boards. I didn't know how. I didn't need to - I have a successful career. I lacked confidence in my idea. Probably a bit of most of these reasons.

Well, this year I've had it with ideas that end up in the "damn, I had that idea first but now someone else has gone and done it" heap. I'm going to turn an idea into reality. Whether anyone else is interested in it is something I'm going to find out, rather than wake up wondering whether there would have been any interest in it 10 years later. Just typing that thought is so liberating and exciting.

I'll use this blog to launch my idea, talk with interested parties and users of the service, and to tell you a little more about me. Launch date October 2007...