First 30 days of Lastehoid.net - 350 Babysitters, 500 FB Fans and 6000+ visitors

March 30, 2011
Lastehoid.net is a service to find babysitters based on your location and other specific search terms. We launched in Estonia during Garage48 for Public Services in February and now looking to expand to other countries. 

We launched the site on noon of 27th of February and started to post links and content to different family oriented portals in Estonia. We invited babysitters to join our database and mothers to visit our website. First 24h brought us 1000 visitors and 70 nannies signed up in our database. Here are quick notes of the 30 days of our project.
I can say that I am a bit amazed how positive feedback we have got so far. There have been many ideas how to improve our service and also whole team knows that there is lot of space for improvements. I have been looking actively for seed funding, so we could take project to the next level. So far we have not gained any negative feedback like the "idea is useless" or "find new hobby".

Being a mathematician, I will through in some numbers and analyses behind these numbers. The project was created during IT startup event then maybe in future this informations help somebody to start their own project. But as main target group are nannies and parents then I try not to go too technical In my explanations.

500+ Facebook Fans

Maybe this number seems not so high, but as we haven't done any campaigns and we haven't promised
anything to win – so all these people are really interested about project and it is much more valuable than
knowing that we have several thousands fans who really would like to own iPad or trip to Carribean but no
need for nannies :)



350 BABYSITTERS

Out of them maybe 1-2% are fake or test users but majority are real forms from real babysitters. Already 28th February first parents found suitable nanny with 15 minutes from our database. As we don't have any good statistics about the contacts our users have made, but there are several nannies who have been contacted more than 10 parents already and there have been even several calls per day.

Average time on babysitter's profile is 36 second and in total there have been 15,751 page views for different babysitter's profiles during first month. The popularity of the profile depends on time when the profile was submitted.

6000+ UNIQUE VISITORS

This number satisfies me least - considering fact that there are more than 100,000 children in age 0-7 in Estonia. Lot's of our traffic has been from IT people (it is normal as we launched project in public during Garage48 Public Services) and also lots of traffic have came from babysitters then during next months we need more marketing job among parents.

As you see from picture then most traffic has came from referring sites. 

TOP10 referring sites:
  • 1. facebook.com
  • 2. cvkeskus.ee (job portal, we put up AD that we are looking for nannies)
  • 3. perekool.ee (biggest parent forum in estonia)
  • 4. naistemaailm.ee (our news was on front-page)
  • 5. garage48.org
  • 6. pereklubi.com (second biggest family portal)
  • 7. neti.ee (estonian google :) )
  • 8. nupsu.ee (family portal)
  • 9. beebionline.ee (family portal)
  • 10. haapsalu.ee (homepage of Haapsalu city)
I guess the biggest issue for us was that Google didn't index our babysitter profiles in the first month and probably we have missed some traffic. We have a basic workaround in place and hopefully we can set up proper sitemap, get Google indexing and start seeing more traffic from search engines.

The first month has been really exciting and the future would be even more fun. Today we are showcased  in one of Estonian TOP3 TV shows. Hopefully there will be more articles in local newspapers, which might lead to leads to get some funding.

We plan to add useful functionality and consider applying to Start-up Sauna, a Finnish startup program starting in May. In case we want to turn the product profitable, we should probably change the scope and targets a bit. Let's see how this goes :)

I feel the main reason for our success so far has been a very strong team - experienced software developers managed to be very focused during the intensive 48h weekend in Garage48. Of course I wanted add more and more features, but we started with the basics and we did it well, hopefully.

Same time I have got a good understanding about the needs of young parents and also about babysitter's market. If there are any young parents, who who would like to start our service in their country, please contact us. You don't need IT background, but internet marketing skills would be useful.

Diana from Lastehoid.net team
E-mail lastehoid.net@gmail.com



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