Babysitters

Pick Your Sitter
A Texas company uses student rush to discover the best nannies in the country.

On an ordinary evening at an upscale boutique in Austin, Texas, the most coveted item is not jewelry or designer clothing but a baby-blue, three-ring binder. Open it and you can read about Haleigh, a CPR-certified graduate of Texas Tech with a degree in human development and family studies. Or flip the page to Jennifer, a former lifeguard studying early childhood education at the University of Texas.

They are just two of the 13 students attending tonight’s Mommy Mixer, a small, informal party where 20 mothers swap numbers with the city’s most qualified babysitters. Every month, dozens of prospective sitters submit a basic profile over the Web that includes references, a headshot, and a schedule of availability. The profiles then get printed out and go into the “babysitter books” that get distributed at the mixer.

Meanwhile, hundreds of mothers vie for an invite every month, and only one person decides who receives them: a petite, easygoing entrepreneur named Mary Sullivan Cooper. The founder of Mommy Mixer draws some attention from the sitters as she wanders in a few minutes late pushing a large, blue stroller.

After she kneels to check on Caroline, her sleeping newborn, Cooper turns and surveys the crowd. Then she grabs a blue binder for herself and casually flips through. Tonight, for a change, she’s not just here on business. Like many of the other moms, she’s here to find somebody hardworking, dependable, and preferably good with girls.

When Cooper recalls what inspired the idea behind Mommy Mixer, she describes a scene straight from The Nanny Diaries. “I worked as a nanny all through the University of Texas, and total strangers would approach me whenever I’d be out with the kids,” she says. “They’d ask if I was free to sit on Friday night.”

Good sitters were tough to find. Neighborhood kids lacked experience, and nanny-locater services were expensive, time-consuming, and wrong for families that wanted only an occasional night off. The shortage of quality sitters revealed an opportunity for Cooper. After a brief stint in brand advertising with Dell Computer, she decided to do something about it.

Cooper knew that if she could find a way to link up part-time sitters and overworked moms, she’d have a hit. But she faced several obstacles. With a wedding in a matter of months, she couldn’t afford to advertise. Working from home, Cooper asked friends, relatives, and anyone who would listen to put her in touch with moms, and then she contacted local campus sororities to recruit sitters.

In May 2003, Cooper finally pulled off her first mixer at a local restaurant. The inaugural event drew 22 students—and three moms. “Thankfully,” she says, “the sitters stuck with me.” Word traveled fast. Cooper hosted three more mixers the following year. Those events pulled in 85 sitters and 57 moms.

That’s when Mommy Mixer started making money. While the sitters still got in free, first-time moms paid a $100 fee and $75 for each additional mixer they attended—no problem for these moms. More than half of Mommy Mixer’s clients, Cooper discovered, have a household income of more than $150,000. Sitters, meanwhile, typically pocket a respectable $10 to $12 an hour and up.

By that point, Cooper had come up with a way to avoiding renting out space: She partnered with local boutiques like Anthropologie and Kick Pleat that appealed to young, image-conscious moms. Everybody won. Mommy Mixer got temporary space in a trendy location free of charge, the stores got a few hours with a prime demographic, the moms got dozens of new contacts and special discounts on high-end merchandise, and the nannies got walking-around money.

Things were going so well for Cooper that she didn’t even need to look for her primary investor, an Austin-based serial entrepreneur named Ben Davis. While on a flight back to Austin, Davis sat next to Cooper’s husband, Matt. The two struck up a conversation. Turns out, Davis already knew about Mommy Mixer; his wife was a regular, and he’d already employed three of their sitters. After a few conversations with Cooper, he saw Mommy Mixer’s potential and decided to get in.

“Mary came up with one of those slap-the-forehead insights,” Davis says. “As an investment, Mommy Mixer serves perhaps the ultimate social network demographic: affluent mothers and college women. New parents with babysitting needs enter the market every day, and today’s sitters are tomorrow’s moms.”

 With Davis and a couple of other investors providing a fresh influx of cash, Cooper was ready to expand. In 2004, she hosted her first mixer in Dallas. Then came Houston in 2005 and Fort Worth, Texas; in 2006. By 2007, the mixers expanded to 17 cities, including Boulder, Colorado; Baton Rouge, Louisiana; and Nashville, Tennessee. Cooper used her college campus connections to recruit part-time regional coordinators who make sure the events went smoothly.

The extra capital also allowed Cooper to launch a website, hire a full-time staff including a brand strategist and a spokeswoman, and move into a slick new office facing Zilker Park.

And despite plans to enter into more competitive markets, Cooper doesn’t foresee any fundamental changes to her brand strategy. “I call it word of Mom instead of mouth,” she says. “We’re fortunate that we don’t need to spend a lot on advertising. When women love something, they talk about it.”

Put simply, the success of Mommy Mixer boils down to one basic idea: Help people make quick, lasting connections. In that respect, Mommy Mixer shares a lot in common with several other successful business models that rely on finding new ways to bring people together.

The closest comparison is with popular speed-dating services like Eight-Minute-Dating. For a small fee, the service will arrange for at least eight single men and women to meet briefly in a casual, public setting. If the sparks fly in the eight minutes allotted for each conversation, the couples can get together again. More than 60,000 people in 55 cities in the United States and Canada have used the service since 2001. Similarly, the website Mediabistro hosts free “All-Media” parties in several cities that aim to pair up reporters, editors, and writers.

Other websites empower users to do the organizing. Active.com, a massive database of team sports and recreational activities, boasts millions of hits every month. Users can register online for everything from triathlons to fun runs, then swap tips on community-oriented message boards prior to the event. Meetup.com goes even further, providing a forum for millions of perfect strangers to arrange get-togethers, whether for a nostalgic game of Dungeons and Dragons or a brisk walk around the D.C. beltway.

The rise of social networking titans like MySpace and Facebook has made it impossible to ignore the importance of making—and maintaining—personal connections. But for all their convenience, they still lack the intimacy of a face-to-face meeting. That weakness is Mommy Mixer’s strength. The company delivers the best of both worlds: the chance to make contacts on a busy schedule and maintain a personal touch.

With plans to expand into more than a dozen cities—including New York City, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C.—Mommy Mixer will face a new set of challenges as it begins its most ambitious year to date. The company will soon tinker with its business model, charging moms $100 per mixer. More important, it will need to find the right personnel to get the word out in the country’s most competitive markets, all while continuing to grow in those cities where it already has a foothold. Mommy Mixer will also need to address bigger questions, such as how to evolve in ways that will foster a stronger sense of community among like-minded moms.

For those answers, they look to the Web. “We predict the Internet will play a much bigger part in our future,” says Sage Baker, Mommy Mixer’s brand and interactive strategist. Baker envisions a more hands-on website complete with message boards, surveys, restaurant ratings, and date-night suggestions for busy couples. “We’ve established a local presence in so many cities that we can become a trusted authority in a lot of different areas,” she says. The company also plans to explore the best way it can cash in on its appeal to such a desirable, hard-to-reach demographic. The website already includes tasteful banner ads for Bot, a brand of fortified water, and Babyplus, a prenatal education system.

Mommy Mixer has explored corporate tie-ins and sponsored mixers, but it approaches both ideas with caution. Cooper only wants to work with companies that can truly benefit mothers without exploiting them. Advertisers won’t determine the future of her company. Those 20 women on the guest list will.

With expansion in the works, new investors lining up, and a growing presence on the Web, Mommy Mixer’s future seems secure. But the best sign of all might be a modest, one-story home on a narrow street not far from downtown Austin. Soon it will serve as Mommy Mixer’s new headquarters. The company has outgrown its old digs and plans to trade the plate-glass windows and panoramic views for a quieter, residential setting. On a brisk January afternoon, Sage Baker stops in front of a window of the new office and peeks inside. The former tenants haven’t abandoned the place yet. But that will change soon.

For a company on the brink of its biggest year, it’s an appropriate move. If nothing else, it speaks to the company’s roots—when Mommy Mixer was just a big idea in the mind of a young entrepreneur working from home, surrounded by baby blue, three-ring binders.

Mike Darling is the associate editor of this magazine.

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Learn more about Mommy Mixer at the official website.

Wondering what qualities you should look for in a sitter? Don’t know how much to pay? Looking for references? Safesitter.org shows you where to start.

When Mommy Mixers aren’t an option, prospective babysitters can still get the word out. The University of Illinois shows how to make flyers, negotiate with families, and relate to kids of all ages.

The best sitters stay prepared for any emergency. Sign up for CPR classes with the American Red Cross and follow their tips for a safe sitting experience.

Does the Mommy Mixer remind you of a certain other babysitting club? Namely, The Babysitters Club? Revel in you nostalgia at the BSC Headquarters blog.

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