made by a cat sitter and a software engineer

A business that was running its owner

Before sitkit, Milly's business was doing well and she was starting to hate it.

The cats weren't the problem. The admin was. A booking began as a WhatsApp message, or an email, or a text, or a phone call. It went into one of several creaking spreadsheets. The payment turned up, eventually, somewhere in her banking app, and had to be matched back to the right customer by hand. Working out who was going where tomorrow meant checking all of it.

It took hours every week. Worse, it was a mistake waiting to happen. In most businesses a slip in a spreadsheet is an embarrassment. In pet sitting it's a cat nobody came to feed.

Then we had a deadline

When we found out our second child was on the way, it was obvious the system wouldn't survive it. You can't keep a business in six different places and your own head on no sleep.

So we went looking for software. Everything we found had the same feel: a big database with a login screen, designed for an office, with pet sitting bolted on. It would have meant reshaping the business to suit the software, and asking customers to sign up for something they didn't want.

Richard had spent two decades helping startups and large companies build better products. So we built our own. Milly started using it a few weeks before our son was born.

Three years, every booking

Every booking her business has taken since has gone through sitkit.

It let her run things from her phone while she recovered and looked after a newborn, handing visits to her team of sitters and knowing each one had the notes and the address they needed. Three years on, the business is bigger than it was, and her customers still deal with her, not with a system.

They've noticed, too. Customers tell her how quick it is to check a booking and pay for it. That doesn't often get said about software that people who aren't technical are made to use.

Why it works the way it does

sitkit wasn't designed in a meeting room. It came from watching one real pet sitting business, day after day, and changing the software until it fitted.

A lot of our first ideas went in the bin. Things that looked clever on a whiteboard got in the way on a real working day. What's left is what earned its place: you add a booking, your customer gets a link, they pay, and it's in your diary.

That's also why sitkit leaves out some things other apps make a fuss of. Customers don't log in to anything or book for themselves, because what keeps a pet sitting business going is that people know and trust the person looking after their animals. We compare sitkit with the alternatives, and say when they'd suit you better, in pet sitting software compared.

Two halves

Plenty of software is built by people who've never done the job it's for. And plenty of people who know a job inside out can't build the tool they wish they had. sitkit has both halves in the same house.

• Milly knows what a pet sitting business needs, because she built one from scratch and runs it every day. If something in sitkit is awkward, she finds out before you do.
• Richard has built and run systems that businesses depend on, for 20 years. That's why sitkit is dependable and careful with your customers' details, and why payments are handled by Stripe and not by something we made up.

Small, and staying that way

We're not a big company and we don't pretend to be. sitkit is small, profitable and here for the long run. There are no investors to please and no plan to sell you things you don't need.

If you email support@sitkit.com, one of us answers. Whichever of us it is, you'll be talking to someone who understands the software and the business you're running.