Canadian mom creates an app to find the perfect babysitter

Mar 21 2018, 3:53 am

On Thursday, March 15th, a Canadian mom went on the popular TV show Dragons’ Den to pitch her business and take on the Dragons.

Elize Shirdel is the founder and CEO of a mobile app called Datenight. The app is meant to give parents a deeper roster of pre-interviewed babysitters, as well as help babysitters safely find future jobs.

Also a Toronto-based mother of two, she found that there was simply too much time consumed in the process of finding, meeting, and interviewing a babysitter. It was too inefficient.

So she created, tested, and built her app – “Datenight”. It allows her and other parents in the Greater Toronto Area to access an extensive selection of babysitters.

From the app, spouses can find a babysitter, interview them, chat, and schedule their next date. The app takes care of the payments and an initial “pre-screening” process.

For babysitters, it creates a safe connection for them to find potential clients and jobs. Shirdel found that there were far too many babysitters that would search for their jobs through Craigslist and other online postings, without knowing what they were getting into.

After running the app with a team of other moms for two years, Shirdel finally took her idea to the Den. Her pitch did not fall on deaf ears, as Manjit Minhas granted Datenight a $100,000 investment.

For Minhas, she loved that it was a business “born out of necessity”.

Datenight now quickly looks to expand outside of the GTA and eventually towards the rest of Canada.

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