Childcare website
Findababysitter.com hit 80,000 members, just the other day. And has already passed this, by now. The company, which uses
postcode and geographic data to return ‘where’s my nearest nanny’ results to parents, credits easy access geographic and addressing data as “essential” for their business model.
The company uses data from
Postcode Anywhere to power its search engine, which enables families to find their own childcare without the involvement of an agency. Contacts in the database include babysitters, nannies, au pairs, child-minders and housekeepers.
The improved service, which re-launched in July 2009, has also grown its initial base of 25,000 local childcare and housekeeping candidates to a list numbering over 40,000.
Tom Harrow, CEO of Findababysitter.com, said: “Findababysitter.com is a one-stop resource for finding childcare and domestic help. The site was established to help people looking for a housekeeper, cleaner, or anything related to childcare – not just babysitters.
“I started the business with my wife Vanessa in 2006. She’d set up a nanny agency, now established with 15 staff. The website empowers people to do the search themselves. With a subscription fee of £30 per month, it can be a very cost-effective way to find childcare.
“We have 40,000 candidates and have just hit 80,000 members, with some more big milestones on the way. We already had a massive database of postcodes and it was just a case of fine-tuning it. Now people can search across London and the rest of the UK using full or part postcodes.
“We get more than 100 registrations a day. When someone registers with us, we validate their address using Postcode Anywhere. It’s very important to us to get the details right as they’re being entered. As with the geo-coding behind the “where’s my nearest?” tool powering the website, our whole business relies on the integrity of our data. Get it wrong, and this falls down.
“We did go through a process to see who would suit our needs best. We narrowed it down to three vendors, looking at price, track record, and by trying to get a feel for uptime levels. In the end, we chose Postcode Anywhere, because it ticked all the boxes.
“We’ve had zero downtime too, which is really very important to us – and to tell the truth, we’d happily pay a lot more for the quality of service we receive from Postcode Anywhere.
“If you want a full host of the postcode and geographic data it’s out of the question for a small business. But access to the data is essential for our business model. Why bother building the service yourself when it’s far more cost-effective and reliable to use an established supplier like Postcode Anywhere?”
The service enables childcare givers to actively search and find local childcare work by applying to jobs posted by families and inviting parents to view their profile page.
Findababysitter.com is free for child carers to sign up and search for local nanny or babysitting jobs. For more information, please visit
www.findababysitter.com.
To find out more about Postcode Anywhere’s range of services for small businesses, please visit
www.postcodeanywhere.com.
