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Comment by codegeek | Hacker News Reader

Good read. I recently became a father and suddenly the need for hiring baby sitters,nannies, house cleaners is critical and like the blog says "it is not rocket science but not as easy as ordering book on amazon", I totally concur. My wife and I have been struggling to find "good" and "reliable" cleaners, or babysitter even though we have tried craigslist, care.come (for nannies) etc.

Basic household needs have many pain points that are asking for innovation. Some of my pain points specially as a family with a kid :

- how to hire good/reliable house cleaners

- how to hire good/reliable nannies/baby-sitters (part/fulltime)

- I hate going to the groceries for items that are pretty much recurring. Eg.: milk,eggs,fruits etc. are mandatory and every time we run out, a trip to the store is needed.

- Food and cooking. ??

View on HN

In the same situation here. A couple of things that made a huge difference on the food and grocery front for us were:

- Ordering regular organic vegetable and meat boxes (we get a vegetable box once a week and meat once a fortnight). Find who does that in your area and give it a try. We use http://www.riverford.co.uk/ and I can't say enough good things about them.

- Online groceries. For the longest time, I thought people shopping for groceries online were weird. Now I understand. Give it a try - it will save you so much time and energy. The first shop is a bit of a pain but the subsequent ones are really quick as you can just go through what you bought previously and pick what you're running out of. In the UK, we tried ASDA (messed up every delivery - awful customer service), Tesco (can't remember why we don't use them anymore. Think they were neither really good nor really bad) and Ocado (absolutely wonderful in every respect. And, just as they say, not more expensive than ASDA or Tesco).

Wow... so first you choose "the family life", then proceed to outsource every last tiny aspect of (used-to-be) "normal" day-to-day ops? You guys must be very, very busy indeed!

Who are you to judge others like that? How much do you know about his situation and choices?

That's progress. Normal day-to-day ops used to include sewing clothes, churning butter, and building furniture.

I understand where you are coming from and I used to be in your shoes until recently. Lately, my time is a lot more valuable and even though I find time for HN :), every minute I spend must be chosen and spent wisely. So for things such as house cleaning (which could be a big deal if you have 3+ beds, 2+ baths and shit load of crap), I would rather outsource to a pro. Can I do it myself ? Hell yea. Would I be doing something else considering my time is critical ? Yep.

I can't help you with the rest of your pain points, but I do own a great house cleaning service. We cover the San Diego, LA and Orange County areas, and we'd love to see if we can take care of item #1: http://goldenshine.com.

</shameless plug>

There's a company here in Austin (can't remember the name) that will deliver fresh organic groceries to your door in a plastic box. They have a form and you just click the interval you want for the "recurring" stuff.

You might be referring to Greenling (http://www.greenling.com/), though I don't recall whether they're the only one.

My only advice is to pay your nanny salary rather than hourly. You will get way more quality candidates. Also, try sitter city in addition to care.com.

Thx will do. For salary, it gets tricky because most of them price themselves hourly and we have to pay for transportation costs. Yes, I live in NY metropolitan area so the cost is steep.

Good nannies can command $60K-80K/year in metro areas like NY and SF.

Working on addressing 'Food and Cooking', would love to get your feedback. Send me a note, email in profile

Best of luck with this Jeffyee, to reach out to us email us at contact@myclean.com and mention that you'd like to get in touch with Michael Scharf.

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