Imagine that your expat family just moved to Ireland and wanted to book a children’s class. There’s a phone of all the contacts, and while your English is good, you cannot grasp the accent and understand what it is you’re being told. That is what it was like in 2008, our arrival year.
Compared to then, when it used to take such a long time to find and book educational or leisure event for a family, families arriving in Dublin today can plan ahead with minutes of reading and a click of a button. Naturally, moving to Silicon Docks, you would expect bespoke services and high-tech solutions to be available. Recently, indeed, there are a lot more well-composed event websites with secure booking. Nanny Village goes yet further, offering its readers a service platform, review site and magazine in one pack!
We’ve met for a coffee with Kate, the owner of the Nanny Village.
Born in Moscow, educated in England, Kate came to Dublin 2.5 years ago, following her husband, who received a job offer. In London, she worked as a broker and business development specialists in IT-consulting. There she got first exposed to IT.
about her business idea and how the Nanny Village came to be
“When we moved, my older daughter - the only one at the time - was seven month. We lived in the house of my husband’s’ parents, in Ballsbridge. I arrived from London, where everything was about us - many friends, children and I found myself in another city, only once visited before, and with a baby. It was spring, and it was always raining, I had an impression that we either went to Herbert Park with an umbrella or stayed at home. I started to look up on the internet if it was possible to find a lady to help with the house and the child.
I contacted several wide-known agencies and when they named the price… it was not affordable for us at the time.
I started looking through Facebook - but then there were no FB groups for finding au pair, as there are now.. au pair was not what we wanted. We needed a nanny, who could come for several hours three times a week, to look after our daughter so I could go a shop, to stroll, get a rest, to visit a sports class - something like that. The only alternative was Gumtree, where you fill out your application and… it is good that I listed the second email - I received over a hundred emails. It didn’t seem realistic to open and read each.
There were different CVs - people sent their documents not only from Ireland, but from Spain, Brazil, from everywhere, while it seemed to me that job description I gave was very exact and clear, but many just ignored that. It was a bit like spam when you open a CV - one has two pages, and other has twelve, the person is 25, and everything is listed: that they started to babysit at 5 when they looked after younger brother up to the last holiday, so it is such a big…
Some candidates were excellent - it is how we found our current nanny - but loads of information and it’s such a waste of time to sort through it when there’s technology to simplify it and present in a standard format. First of all, to simplify how information is presented, and how to contact the person. Based on my personal experience the idea was born of creating Nanny Village.
At the same time, I looked for classes to go with my daughter. I found little by little on different websites, but it all was spread over the internet, and there was no place where you could read about everything. Even if there was information about some class, there was only days and times, “come join us” - no additional information, and you don’t know what to expect. There were also very few reviews. It was either “Аmazing, come again”, or “Not worth the money”, and not clear why.
That’s why on our website when we describe events or classes for children all, that is written, written either by me or by other moms - “regulars” and the reader can be sure what to expect, arriving at the class. We never recommend something where we don’t bring our children.”
about how Nanny works
“The basic idea of Nanny Village is to help parents find a childcare solution, be it a nanny, a babysitter, an au-pair. The idea is that you go on the website as a family - for example, I’m looking for a nanny. I click on Nanny Village, and I look through the database - for free - of potential nannies. I can filter them by nanny/au pair, so I can only see the relevant people, and then, for example, a keyword - a person would be.. would have French.
So I’m looking for my Nannies with French, and I finally feel like - ha, she looks good… A lot of the time people are anxious about giving up their personal information - email and phone number. Here, you don’t have to worry about this side, because you can quickly create a Nanny Village profile. All you need to do is an email address and a password, or people have the option of signing in with Facebook, and then they create a basic Family Profile, and they can use the internal messaging system to send nanny a message.
For example, I like Lidia, and I say - “Hi, Lidia, interested in you!”
Once you’ve sent the original message, the nanny would get an automatic notification email in her inbox that she has received a message from a family, so then she can go back to her profile and reply to the family and the process goes on. So it’s not just profiles of people, it’s also a way to communicate. Having said that, we don’t vet anybody who is registered. The only condition is- we ask of people to be based in Ireland and have the right to work in Ireland.
However, it’s the responsibility of the parents to do all the background checks, to make sure that the nanny does have the right Visa if she happens to be outside EU, that she does have experience that she is talking about. So with our basic service, we give you the platform and the access to people, but it’s your responsibility at the end of the day to check people - that’s the idea. Nanny profile shows primary information about a person, it’s standardized, and everything - you can see everything - but it’s obvious, that more questions should be asked when you meet the person.”
When a family can’t find what it’s looking for - they can create Family profile and place it on the website, that way mostly new Nannies, who are not yet registered with the website, will see the profile and contact them.
“There’s also another part, which is a very new service called Bespoke Premium Search. This service is fee-based and here we would act on behalf of parents and we would go out and actively look for the nanny or childminder. In that case, we would interview all the candidates and we would meet them, we’d do background checks, and then recommend the right people - but also at the end of the day, the responsibility always lies with the family to make sure that they find the right person.
For me a very important feature of the website is our message system, allowing users to contact nanny directly. People communicate and make arrangements and I’m very happy that with all the alternatives out there and despite minimal budget for the website development they use it. The site grew significantly from the moment we launched it. I have many plans and ideas what I want the site to become compared to what it’s now. I will have more time to devote to it when my daughter starts Montessori soon.”
about starting expat business, networking and local attitude towards expats
“What do you mean hard to start? It is always hard, every time and for everybody.”
“It is always good to have acquaintances. It helps in Ireland, as well as in any other country. With my website - all the people who I found, they are very open. We all work on the project together, volunteer, we do everything because we want to do it. For someone, it is a creative outlet, for others - entry experience for the specific niche. I was pleasantly surprised with how friendly Irish people are…in particular, Irish women - because I work only with the ladies - how they took me seriously, considering that the website idea - how it will look - came to me last summer, when I was 6 months pregnant. When I met with people, I was 8-9 month pregnant, so very heavily. In some other countries - for example, in Russia, everybody would run from such a woman, but here the attitude was healthy and positive, everyone was supportive! If you have connections - it always helps, but I didn’t.”
about growing popularity of the new forms of online media format and importance of the negative feedback
“I hope we will grow in the future because there’re not many similar projects. At the moment, we’re working for Dublin, and many parents write from other counties: “Why don’t we have such a service in our county?” Meanwhile, we want to learn from our own mistakes here, in Dublin area, and when we feel like we hundred percents know what we’re doing, then we’ll go nationwide.
We always want any kind of feedback - positive and, especially, negative - we don;t afraid to change. When we launched the website - it was on Tuesday, and my daughter was born on Friday - I knew it wasn’t ready, it wasn’t ideal, but.. there’s no limit to perfection, you launch and you learn! You see here, on my card - “research activities and parenting forum,” if you click on Nanny Village now - there’s no parenting forum anymore, it became apparent very fast that parents of Dublin do not need one more parenting forum, that there’s overload of information already. So you try, and if it works - splendid, if not - no worries, you give it up and try something else. We are not afraid to learn from our mistakes.”
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