UrbanSitter Finds You a Parent Recommended Babysitter [e77]
The guys talk about UrbanSitter, the company that matches up parents with prospective babysitters in the area. They then answer the question, "Can I get in trouble for having my employees give our competitors negative reviews on review sites?" Full Podcast Transcript NASIR: Welcome to Legally Sound Smart Business. This is Nasir Pasha. MATT: And this is co-host, Matt Staub. NASIR: Hey, can’t do that! MATT: Yeah. NASIR: Okay, it’ll be off but welcome to our business legal podcast where we cover business legal news – actually, business news and then we add our legal twist to it – and then also answer some of your business legal questions that you, the listener, can send in to ask@legallysoundsmartbusiness.com. And, oh, I did some research on dot-pizza. MATT: And? NASIR: So, apparently, they’ve been taking applications in 2014 but I can – or whoever handles these domain names – hasn’t yet released any dot-pizzas yet to the public so I think we can put our application in but we still have to wait. But it’s weird. The application process just seems like you just say that you want one. It’s not like you have to prove that you’re a pizza shop or anything. So, I may do that. But, if anyone knows anything about that, then we could use some help in understanding how that works. That’d be great. MATT: If worst comes to worse, I make pizzas all the time. So, I think we can justify it. NASIR: I think we can just add a pizza to the end of the website somehow. MATT: Or change the logo to just a pizza. NASIR: Yeah, that’d be great. All right, what do we have today? MATT: This is a business that I had never heard of. Why would I have heard of it, I guess? It’s called UrbanSitter and it’s basically a way to – how would you describe this? Like a matchmaking way to find a sitter for your kids if you need one and it’s kind of like, at the same time, a mix between that and sort of reservations – like, dinner reservations. NASIR: Yeah, I guess it’s that easy. To me, it’s kind of like an old tradition, right? I mean, you’ve had young babysitters being used for quite a while – since the dawn of time, I would say – and finding a way to easily find a babysitter for you – not that I have kids – I think is a great service. But it seems kind of weird to me because you’re trusting your kids with somebody. Finding someone that you can trust and using this third-party site, it reminds me of Uber, right? For whatever reason, we assume that, when we use Uber or Lyft or these other third-party services – or frankly even a taxi – that somehow the person that we’re getting in the car with is someone that we can trust. In general, I think you can trust most people. In this case, just because you’re using a third-party software doesn’t necessarily mean you can trust that babysitter. MATT: That’s true, but it’s not like you just get matched with somebody and that’s that. I mean, there’s recommendations. I would assume that the company does some sort of background check on the possible sitters because I know other sites have done that. What’s pretty interesting about this though, they actually tried to launch this before Facebook even existed. NASIR: Oh, interesting. MATT: You know, that’s a long time ago – at least that’s what this article says. NASIR: At least in internet times. It looks like they do some background checks and it’s paid for by the actual sitter – which is interesting – but we all know that background checks, they’re not foolproof, obviously, right? Second is I think this UrbanSitter is going to go through the same, especially when they start to get really popular which looks like now they have more than 35,000 sitters and 75,000 parents nationwide. But the point is that that they’re going to have the same problems as all these other sharing economies – whether it’s Airbnb or Uber or what-have-you. What happens if that babysitter does something wrong? I think the law is pretty much all there but the question is,