Introduction
ZipSit came to Coplex, the startup studio I was a product manager for, wanting an on-demand marketplace for parents to find babysitters. Uber for sitters. Their team was three finance people and one outside technical advisor, no product or engineering of their own.
I ran product on the engagement: kickoff, discovery, design, and through an 8-week build to an iTunes Store submission.
Timeline
Sometimes you don't make what you want to make
The upfront cost of background-checking every sitter on the platform was huge, and it didn't taper the way ZipSit hoped it would.
The original plan had ZipSit fronting background-check costs for any babysitter a parent might book, on the assumption that cost would fall as parents built trust and stuck with sitters they already liked. Partway through discovery, the team realized that bet was backwards. They dropped the on-demand, stranger-vetting model and rebuilt around a "sitter circle" instead: parents curate their own small circle of sitters they already know, and the vetting responsibility moves to them. Development started from that model, not the original one.
How it came together
Alex, a designer with marketplace-babysitting experience from Ukraine, joined a week after kickoff and had a working prototype in InVision within a couple of weeks. Client communication ran through Basecamp, with a budget and progress report out to ZipSit every week. On the engineering side, Steven had built several marketplace apps before and ran development through Pivotal Tracker: user stories staged in an Icebox, pulled into Current as the team had capacity, overflow tracked in a Backlog.
Tools
Future
- Support multiple, interconnected sitter circles so the sitter side of the marketplace can grow beyond parents introducing sitters they already know.
- Let sitters apply to circles directly through a questionnaire and interview, opening the platform to parents who don't already have a circle to join.