Anna's List

The babysitter-app category is a sea of strangers, bidding wars, and profiles no parent fully trusts. What families actually want is smaller and older than any feed: a short list of people a neighbor already vouches for. The brief for this concept: design a warm, invite-only alternative that feels like a recommendation from a friend, with real booking and payments underneath so it is more than a directory.

We built the product around a curated, vetted “bench” of sitters instead of an open marketplace, and wrote it in a reassuring, neighborly voice. The flow is three steps — browse the bench, request a sitter, a service, and a window, then book and breathe — with each sitter’s own rate shown upfront and one transparent service fee. Accounts, login, and a Stripe-backed checkout handle the money quietly, and the whole thing covers babysitting, house sitting, dog watching, and the odd extra pair of hands.

The demonstration shows how a trust-first, invite-only marketplace can stay personal while still handling real bookings and payments. The vetted-bench, request-a-window, and Stripe-checkout pattern generalizes to any local-services or two-sided-marketplace product where confidence in the person matters more than the size of the feed.