If you’ve ever struggled with finding a babysitter, calling around only to find out that your favorite sitters are busy, Helpr is going to make your day. Booking a reliable sitter in Southern California—Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, and Orange County—is now as easy as opening this new iPhone app.
Helpr bills itself as “the premier mobile app for screened babysitters on-demand.” Co-founders Kasey Edwards and Becka Klauber launched the app a few months ago, on New Year’s Eve, but they’ve already been working together for about 10 years.
In 2007, the duo founded a babysitting agency called University Sitters. Years later, once they realized the opportunities that going mobile could provide, “That’s when Helpr became a thing,” says Edwards.
The WeWork Santa Monica members started developing the app in March 2015. While Edwards and Klauber’s main goal was to make life easier for parents and babysitters, it has changed their own jobs as well.
According to Edwards, “Now, instead of us having to go through our memory database in our heads or check a spreadsheet of who [the parents] worked with in the past, it’s automatically filled in. Parents can book at 10 o’clock at night—we don’t have to be in the office—and they can get the same reply in 10 minutes that they would’ve had to wait until the morning for.”
More features in the works include videos on the sitter profile pages, the ability for parents to set up a recurring booking, and a referral program. Although Helpr is currently available only on iOS, they’re working on developing an Android app and a web application. In the meantime, Klauber points out that Android users can still use Helpr: “If they make an introduction, we can create an account on our backend, and they can just communicate when they need to.”
Edwards and Klauber are not only co-founders and best friends—they’ve co-parented two foster children. “Even before we started building the mobile app,” says Edwards, “We felt like we’d had a lot of success in our lives, and we asked ourselves, ‘How do we show our appreciation and gratitude for that experience?’”
In 2014, they took on part-time foster care for two girls, ages four and nine, through the nonprofit Safe Families. “We had weekend care for the predominant amount of time that we worked with them,” says Klauber. “Kasey and I took the older one on full-time for a couple of months, so it was a very functional two-household family, where she would go week by week to my house or Kasey’s.”
As co-parents, they had the support of each other, as well as their reliable “sitter fleet” helping with school drop-offs and date nights, an early sign that the childcare company they were building was well underway.
Photos: Bettina Niedermann