Nanno Investor Update - November
Hello, Republic Community!
Liz from Nanno here, checking in from the front lines of the childcare revolution with an update on Nanno’s progress in cracking the code on on-demand childcare.
Quote of the Month:
"My wife is now finally totally onboard with Nanno! She went from a skeptic to a total fan. I know she has been spreading the word at the office and several of her coworkers are now users."
By the Numbers:
Quarter over Quarter Growth (Absolute)
Parent User Growth: 370%
Sitter User Growth: 117%
GMV Growth: 111%
Bookings Growth: 120%
Average Monthly Growth for Q3
Parent User Growth (MoM): 14%
Sitter User Growth (MoM): 48%
GMV Growth (MoM): 26%
Bookings Growth (MoM): 34%
Roses (Our Wins for the Month):
Increasing Operational Efficiencies in Sitter Onboarding: This was one of our big goals for the past month — and the urgency was exacerbated by a huge influx of new sitters due to a change by one of our competitors (UrbanSitter) to a model where sitters have to pay to join their platform, causing massive defection of sitters. Luckily, we were already on it, and had already successfully increased operational efficiencies so we were able to handle the influx. This enabled us to take advantage of the windfall while at the same time demonstrating our readiness to scale in that capacity.
Increasing Sitter Capacity in Core Markets: Another of our core focuses was accomplished partly through the UrbanSitter defection and partly through more streamlined acquisition strategies. We achieved an average 20% increase in sitter candidates in our core markets (other than Denver and New York, where we’re already sitter-heavy) in October alone.
Increasing Activation: One of our perpetual “health” metrics is the number of parent users who sign up (subscriptions) versus those who sign up and book a sitter (activations). We are always trying to improve this metric — and also use it as a benchmark to make sure our marketing activities are not resulting in a disproportionate amount of non-converting “leads.” Our benchmark activation rate is 10%, but since July 2019, we’ve seen our activation rate in our 9 core markets reach 18%, and in our flagship market of Denver, it’s reached 30%.
Thorns (What We Struggled With):
Our biggest struggle over the past month was scaling our operations processes to keep up with growth. Our original intent was to wait until after we’d closed our seed round to focus on ramping up our operations in preparation to scale, but we found that even the growth we saw in August, September and October was enough to tax our processes. (To be fair, we did double our revenue during that period.) Luckily, our team is lean and nimble, and we were able to make a lot of important changes quickly. We’ve implemented a call center and customer service ticketing system, and have successfully automated many the processes that were causing the most burden on our system. We still have a lot to do, but these improvements are already improving our operational capacity significantly.
Buds (Our Goals for Next Month):
Because we had to prioritize operational issues in the past month, we fell behind on some of our other initiatives. In November, we plan to roll out the initial / MVP version of our new “superpowers” feature (matching parents with sitters with special skills, like tutoring, art and music projects, etc.).
Based on input from some experienced advisors, we have doubled down on our efforts to focus our growth activities on our top 9 markets, to get them to a state of maturity similar to what we're seeing in Denver where our organic growth is high and (therefore) our CAC is low. We are working on a few initiatives in that regard, which we will be launching this month.
Nanno in the News
“Nanno App Review: A Safe Childcare Alternative” (Parentology)
As always, please do reach out with any questions/suggestions!
Liz