Tonightish Makes It Easier To Book Trusted Babysitters w/ Twilio SMS
Time to read: 2 minutes
March 26, 2013
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Booking a babysitter is no small task. Typically, you need to book a sitter weeks in advance. If your go-to sitter isn’t available, you might be canceling your Friday night plans. Tonightish hopes to change this, and bring parents some much needed spontaneity.
Tonightish expands your circle of trusted babysitters, and puts them one push of a button away via a mobile app.
Here’s how it works for parents: You can share your list of trusted babysitters with your friends through the app and vice a versa. You select the dates and times you need a babysitter, and pick from your select list of babysitters that are available at that time. The sitters will reply if they want the job and you can select which sitter you want to book. You’ll get a confirmation they’ve accepted via Twilio SMS.
For babysitters, they don’t even need to download the app. They’ll get a text with the details of the job request and can reply “yes” or “no”. If they like Tonightish, they can build out a profile which will help them get more jobs in the future.
“It’s a change in thought for most parents because they’re used to asking each sitter sequentially. Now, they can ask multiple sitters at the same time,” says co-creator Susie Kroll, a former payments manager at Amazon. She got the idea for the app after using Uber and wondering if there was a similar, easy app for booking sitters at the last minute. After partnering with mobile developer Simon Fortelny, they began building. As a mother herself, Susie built the app with two things in mind: ease and security.
Tonightish keeps the numbers of parents and sitters secret, using Twilio numbers that forward to their personal numbers, and only revealing each party’s personal number after they each have accepted the job. “Security is really, really important,” says Susie.
Spontaneity is also important. Susie remembers flipping a coin with her husband to see which one of them would be able to see a friend who was only in town for 24 hours, and which of them would stay home. She’s hoping to solve those last-minute-scramble situations with Tonightish.
Susie and Simon are currently working on enabling payment within the app, as well as social platform integration. To learn more about Tonightish, you can check out their website here.
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