Los Altos parents Andrew and Shelley Meyer discovered Otter, a babysitter-parent pairing platform, last December. Since then, they haven’t looked back when it comes to hiring sitters for their 2- and 4-year-old children.
Helen Mayer, Otter co-founder and CEO, came up with the idea for the company in August 2020. In the early months of the pandemic, her circumstances forced her to become a stay-at-home parent. Her twins’ day care shut down and her first company stalled out. Although she was later offered what she described as her dream job, she said she had to rescind her acceptance because she couldn’t find reliable and safe child care.
That was when she took action.
“I was so frustrated by the lack of safe options for child care that I spent a few months learning about why the system was so broken,” Mayer said. “A few months later, I stepped in to help a group of moms on a Facebook thread and eventually ended up starting Otter so I could support parents everywhere.”
Mayer began pairing stay-at-home parents with other stay-at-home parents looking for child care. The idea evolved, and Mayer established Otter as a parent-sitter matchmaking platform that provides parents with vetted, reliable sitters.
Otter officially launched in the South Bay last September. Nearly 500 parents, 35 of whom live in Los Altos, Los Altos Hills and Mountain View, have access to an estimated 70 sitters active in the local area.
Vigorous vetting
Although stay-at-home parents were the initial sitters on the platform, they’re not the only ones parents can use to care for their children.
Mayer said many of the sitters aren’t parents themselves, and a substantial number are college students, including many from Stanford University. Other sitters range from nurses to nannies, according to the Otter website.
“Anyone with significant child care experience can apply to become a sitter through Otter, at which point they go through our vetting process,” she said. “Our vetting process includes a background check, a reference check and a skills assessment, and keeps a high bar.”
Mayer said only approximately 10% of sitter applicants are invited to join the Otter community. All of the sitters – and platform users – undergo a background check.
Otter’s background check is comprehensive and often covers county and national criminal searches, a sex offender search, a Social Security number trace and a global watchlist search.
“People are sometimes surprised that we ask that parents are background-checked as well, but we think it sets us apart in terms of safety for all parties,” Mayer added.
According to Andrew Meyer, the background check was quick. He said his family often opts to be paired with Stanford students, and of the five Otter sitters his family has used in their five months on the platform, all experiences have been positive.
“Every person’s a little different, but they’ve all brought kind of good, positive energy to the house and seem engaged with our kids,” he said of the sitters.
In the first few months of using Otter, Meyer said it was more of a text-and-find situation, where parents would send a message and be paired with a sitter who met the qualifications the parents laid out.
“These days, it’s an online platform,” he said. “We would go in and say, you know, ‘This is the day and time that we’re looking for a sitter.’ We would also say if we have any preferences, or any past sitters that we’ve already had that we want them to try to use again if that person is available. And then they will either tell us, ‘Yes, this person is available,’ or ‘The person you asked for is not available, but we have this other person.’”
If their requested sitter wasn’t available, the Meyers would receive a profile of a prospective sitter detailing their qualifications, CPR certification and past experience with children.
“We’ve always said, ‘Yes, that was good,’ but I assume if we said ‘no,’ then they would find someone else,” he said of Otter.
Mayer noted that after signing up, parents can start looking for a sitter immediately.
“And sometimes we can find a sitter with as little as a few hours’ notice,” she said. “We aim to provide true backup care and be a parent’s Plan A when they need child care.”
Costs for the service run by the hour, adjusted according to when parents make sitter requests: $45 for requests made within 24 hours, $35 within 48 hours and $25 for more than 48 hours out. A $2 per hour
upcharge is added Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays.
“As a parent myself, I know how important trust, availability and reliability are,” Mayer said. “I’ve built Otter to be the easiest way for parents to find high-quality, reliable child care that fits into their schedule. Using Otter is easy: You submit a care request and we do all the work to find you a vetted sitter who is available on the day and time you need.”
For more information on Otter, visit withotter.com.
