myBestHelper – The On Demand Resource To Help Overworked Parents
Your car is in for repairs and it’s freezing outside, so you call an Uber to pick you up. You need your lawn mowed urgently before your BBQ, so you jump on TaskRabbit and find a local college kid who would love to make some extra cash. You have an important meeting at work, but your child is too sick to go to school and your elderly relative has a doctor’s appointment, so you call… wait a minute…it’s just not that simple!
Over the last five years the rise of the share economy has seen new “peer-to-peer” platforms such as Lyft, Uber, TaskRabbit and AskforTask skyrocket, offering access to “on demand” helping hands for a range of day-to-day tasks, and providing a welcome extra income for millions of Americans.
However, for those of us who work and have families or dependant relatives, while these share economy services might take up the slack for those extra tasks, they don’t offer us assistance when we really need it. For many of us, the unpredictable pressures of caring for our families, and having a career, are pushing us to breaking point.
Nowadays, family units are smaller, social networks of friends and neighbors are often less present, and with an aging population in the U.S, more baby boomers are living longer with chronic and serious illnesses. All this makes it harder to deal with the challenges of covering child, elder and illness care while focusing on demands at work. A 2015 Angus Reid survey showed that 59% of American families would describe their daily life as “overwhelming.”
Enter myBestHelper, a Canada-based startup that provides a quick and reliable resource to find nannies, babysitters and caregivers of all descriptions in your local area and at short notice.
Since its launch in 2011, the childcare startup has won a number of innovation awards, collaborated with the prestigious Vancouver accelerator, Invoke Labs, and expanded its services to the United States.
Co-founder, Dr. Alexandra Greenhill, a mother of three, qualified doctor and regular public contributor on the theme of providing assistance to working families, founded the startup out of frustration with the lack of options available in her home city of Vancouver. After trying out various online classified sites like Craigslist, and sites like CanadianNanny.ca, Greenhill struggled to find a resource where she could provide around-the-clock care for her three children and aging relatives, while also juggling the commitments of being a full-time M.D.
While care was available, she found that the sites were not ‘on-demand’ and couldn’t deal with the last minute situations that arise in real life. Also, Greenhill was concerned that the platforms failed to provide appropriate references and enough background information for caregivers to really find a good match for children or elderly relatives.
myBestHelper adds the personalized elements of a social media platform with the security of Uber, allowing those in need of help to post messages to those in their local area with exactly what they require, and then browse the profiles of those who answer to find the best match. Security is of paramount concern for the startup. Each applicant who wants to take jobs via the site needs to undertake a thorough vetting process, and clients can leave comments on caregivers’ profiles about the quality of their care.
“myBestHelper helped me quickly find a nanny I could trust with caring for our 10 month old son. I loved the way each applicant was vetted: the myBestHelper team made me feel confident that the person we picked could properly care for our son,” said Lindsay W., a full-time working dad.
Finding the perfect match is obviously a concern for users. No one is going to hand over care of their nearest and dearest to any Tom, Dick, or Harry from the internet. myBestHelper uses algorithms that match users based not only on location, but also on character and experience with a certain age group in a blink of an eye, leaving parents or carers to easily pick the best candidate and get on with their busy day.
More than just another find-a-nanny platform, the site is designed to be a one-stop resource for busy people who need a helping hand. Be it a Spanish tutor for your teenage kid, a specialized nurse for a chronically ill relative, or just someone to grab the groceries when you are stuck in traffic with a car full of hungry kids and an empty fridge. Who you gonna call? myBestHelper.
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