Our Honor & Privilege
An honest look at a big question. When tech merges with the most intimate spaces.
I’ve been getting the question a lot — how can a parent trust an app like Helpr? This is such an important question and it’s my honor and privilege to answer it.
We’ve given the answer many times. Usually it happens privately over the phone to a client who’s never booked a sitter before. A lot of times they’ve moved to a new city, feeling a little lost without the traditional support networks and our team will welcome them to our village of support.
Our approach pivots on three key points:
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100,000 hours
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Loving kids, honoring childhood.
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#allkids
100,000 hours
With our previous venture, which Becka and I started in college at UCSB called University Sitters, we helped to place one hundred thousand hours of in-home care. We’d been sitters for years and created the network as the only way to replicate ourselves for clients requesting more help than we could personally offer. We always felt responsible to lend a hand when asked to.
We’ve been there for weddings, anniversaries, births, deaths, exceptionalities, sibling rivalries, soccer practice, birthday parties, homework help, divorce. Any major transition or minor detail we’ve attended to. We worked the phones for years and know our clients and their needs intimately.
Loving kids, honoring childhood.
We love hanging out with kids. Just take a look at our Instagram. If you have a baby, and we have a meeting, we hope the baby will join us. Parent send us videos and pictures of the triumphs in their family life.
Our helprs are there to honor your kids and their experience. They likeworking with kids and want to learn from them. Our sitters don’t just supervise, they find creative ways to engage with the children at the appropriate development level.
#allkids
When we were putting the concept together for Helpr, Becka and I decided to take on one of the biggest challenges of our lifetime. We were working night and day trying to create a minimum viable product that we could launch to help parents reach our sitters faster and cheaper — to scale the thing that we did best for so many years at University Sitters.
We knew Helpr had to connect with everyone. We knew that we wanted parents to hear loud and clear that every decision we make whether it product or hire or partnership, we would have the best interest of the kids at heart. So we pushed ourselves even further into the space.
Together we fostered for one year, two wonderful children who’ve become an integral part of our forever lives. The experience taught us so much about ourselves, our friendship, our ability to love through heartbreak, to be strong to help others grow. We were reminded of the huge responsibility we have to continue to create and care for relationships in the home.
Tech leveraged relationship creation is our business and we are built by a team with a combined 40 years in the field. Trust will continue to grow over time as our culture is revealed. But we wouldn’t feel comfortable trying to scale without the experience we have. We take this head start and remind our collaborators that the wider we are, the more quality control we achieve. We dream of setting the bar for childcare from LA to Miami to London.
If you’re a parent, disruption is not a word you want to associate with. It usually has something to do with a nap being over too soon on account of an unexpected visitor or a barking dog. But this time, we can assure that a disruption is going to be very welcome. We want to make child care safer, more accessible, and more valuable. We want every parent to feel supported, every kid to feel appreciated and heard, and every sitter to feel respected.
After 12 years of friendship and several iterations of babysitting services, it’s our privilege to release Helpr. We hope you’ll invite us to be there for the big and small moments.
