Australian startup snapshot: Kindy

Kindy is a mobile app that connects parents with babysitters. Credit: Kindy

Like Uber but for babysitting, Kindy is a mobile app that helps parents to find carers to watch their children.

The Sydney-based startup launched its app only three months ago but has already won awards including first place at OzAPP 2015.

Computerworld Australia sat down with co-founders Hugh Podmore, CEO, and Kristian Tasevski, CTO, to talk about their success so far, the future of the app and their views on the Australian startup scene.

The pitch

With Kindy, parents can post ads for nannies and sitters that push notifications to local child carers who have signed up for the service. When a sitter responds to the ad, parents can view the carer’s profile and contact them directly through the app in a messaging interface similar to WhatsApp.

In the current version of Kindy, parents and babysitters must set up their own payment arrangements. However, Kindy is working on Stripe integration, expected for release shortly, that will let parents set up one-time or recurring payments with carers.

Kindy vets each carer by looking at his or her government-issued ID number for the Working With Children Check, and cross checking the number against their photo ID. The check is run by state governments in Australia. While carers do not need to submit the Working With Children code, those who pass Kindy’s vetting process get to display a “verified” badge in their profile.

Parents can also leave ratings for carers. The startup is considering adding a method for carers to rate parents, much like how in Uber drivers can rate their passengers.

In most cases, parents meet with carers in person before putting them in charge of their children, but the app does not require it.

Kindy is available in all mainland Australian capital cities.

The app has taken a mobile-first approach and supports Android and Apple mobile devices. Kindy has a Web presence so that users can, for example, share URLs for carer profiles. However, the website does not have the core functionality of the app, including posting ads or communications.

“There are competitors to our product, but they’re very much old-style Web directories,” says Podmore.

While those competitors are now adding mobile services, Kindy has the advantage of designing for mobile first, he says.

Tasevski adds, “There was not an obvious app that we could take inspiration from.”

Funding and development

Kindy is about one year old. It started development in April 2014 and launched the app in October. Including Podmore and Tasevski, there are six people on the team.

Podmore says he got the idea while helping a colleague with Web design and online marketing for a brick-and-mortar nanny agency.

“I realised there’s a big problem here, but that traditional model really couldn’t help people. For these kinds of marketplaces to work, you need Internet scale to be able to match people up together.”

After pitching the idea to Tasevski and other friends, the startup Kindy was born.

So far, the startup has been largely bootstrapped, though it recently received USD$100,000 for winning the top prize at the OzAPP awards. Kindy has recently opened an angel investment round.

“We’re at the stage where we’ve got a product to market, [and] we’ve validated it with some early customers, showing very positive signs,” says Podmore. “We’re looking for a small amount of investment, in the hundreds of thousands [of dollars] rather than the millions.”

Kindy has received advice from OneFlare, another Sydney startup, and the startups share office space. Tasevski designed the iPhone app for OneFlare, and the Kindy co-founders used to work with OneFlare founder Marcus Lim at Deloitte.

Next page: How Kindy won at OzAPP

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Selling it

Kindy has 4000 customers in Australia, with carers representing about two-thirds of that figure, says Podmore.

Kindy charges parents a subscription fee of $39.99 for three months for unlimited messaging and full premium features.

Kindy seeks to grow its customer base organically through word of mouth, says Podmore. For example, Kindy waives its subscription fee for customers who refer the product to three of their friends, he says.

Of course, the app’s success depends on getting carers to participate. In the early days, the Kindy founders reached out to babysitters who posted ads on Gumtree, but now is winning new carers through word of mouth, says Podmore.

“You have to do that hard slog in the beginning, but then it starts gaining momentum.”

It’s not difficult convincing carers to join Kindy, claims Tasevski. “We didn’t really face any hurdles getting the carers because we found the carers were quite happy to list themselves on multiple [platforms] … It just increases their exposure.”

Kindy could expand internationally in the future, but first wants to prove its business model locally, the co-founders say. One challenge to international expansion is that not all countries have a child care verification system like Australia’s Working with Children Check.

“The focus for us over the next year is product, product, product,” says Tasevski.

Up next for Kindy is adding payments to the mobile app through integration with Stripe. When this is enabled, users will be able to pay for a carer without leaving the app. Kindy plans to take a cut of the fee.

The company has also experimented with adding video and audio interviews to carer profiles to give parents a better idea of the person they are hiring.

Awards

Kindy won the top prize at the 2015 OzAPP awards in Perth. The event, which combines kite surfing with pitches from startups around the Asia Pacific, was co-founded by Silicon Valley venture capitalist Bill Tai.

“Both of us were pretty shocked that we won, to be honest, because there was a lot of a good competition,” says Podmore.

It wasn’t the company’s first win. At the end of 2014, Kindy won at the Aus Mobile & App Design Awards for best audience migration to mobile technology.

Podmore says he believes a key to the company’s success at competitions has been that Kindy is a fairly straight-forward idea to explain. “You always hear about elevator pitches, but it’s true. You switch off unless someone can just explain it to you simply.”

The app also receives kind reviews from users on a daily basis, which Tasevski says is a big change from the reviews he used to see when he worked on a mobile app for Westpac.

“You’d never get a piece of feedback from customers saying, ‘Thank you Westpac, you helped me to pay my rent.’”

Rating the startup scene

“There’s a lot of support [and] a lot of incubators popping up,” says Tasevski of the Australian startup scene.

Podmore says that’s a recent trend.

“My impression , speaking to people who have been in startups for a few years in Sydney and Melbourne, is that a lot of that support ecosystem around startups has only really happened in the last three or four years.

“It’s easier now to do a startup than it would have been a couple of years ago.”

The scene is strongest in Sydney and Melbourne, he said. “We’re not the Valley yet.”

It’s still easier to raise money in Silicon Valley, and companies there have been surprised by how low Australia’s valuations are, the co-founders say.

“We were speaking to the CTO of Farmville at the OzAPP Awards and we told him the numbers we were expecting in our angel round, and he just kind of looked at us strangely,” says Tasevski.

Even so, Podmore says he’s optimistic about the Australian startup ecosystem.

“It is possible to have a big global software company based out of Australia. I don’t think it’s at the point where you have to move overseas.”

Previous startup snapshots:

Mobilyser
Reffind
Cloud Awakening
Bugwolf
Vimcore
Gym PocketGuide
Peepable
Shiny Things

Adam Bender covers startup and business tech issues for Techworld and is the author of dystopian sci-fi novels We, The Watched and Divided We Fall. Follow him on Twitter: @WatchAdam

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