Scott Klipper needed to be in two places at once.
The 39-year-old father had to pick up his son from school and take him to an after-school program, but he and his wife were both stuck at work. He scanned local Facebook groups for a part-time babysitter but couldn’t find anyone willing to do a half-hour drop-off or an on-demand assignment.
“I just wanted someone to walk my kid a couple of blocks,” Klipper said. “I would see all these parents posting in these Facebook groups saying, ‘I need someone just to pick up my kid.'”
Then Klipper encountered Lovable.
Over the course of a week, he created a preliminary model of Trot My Tot, a platform where parents can find short-term nannies for one-off gigs. With parents’ feedback and a little coding push at the very end, the platform went live.
Check out Kilpper’s app:
Trot My Tot helps families in New York City and the surrounding areas coordinate transportation and short-term care for their children through local caregivers, whom he calls “trotters.” Many of the trotters are part-time nannies or college students who can accommodate a morning commitment.
Klipper, who said he is “more likely to break code” if asked by a colleague to fix it, is one of the many “vibe coders” who create apps and websites without actually writing code themselves. Using platforms like Lovable, Cursor, and Replit, these civilian coders have designed tools to make their lives easier, including tools to find groceries at the store or figure out what to feed their baby.
“If you’re getting your hands on AI and understanding how it works or what’s happening in the world, you’re going to be benefiting yourself in the end, whether you’re making a tool that’s helping families or just helping yourself by making something easier in life,” Klipper said.
Vibe coding for entrepreneurship
Klipper said he always had an entrepreneurial spirit. In middle school, he shoveled driveways in the neighborhood. After graduating from Northeastern University in 2010, he started a small sunglasses business. Now a managing director at a hedge fund, the father of two kept ideating on side projects.
Klipper began experimenting with different prompts last fall. His early logs show that he asked Lovable to make an app that mirrors the features of the dog-walking app Rover, like GPS tracking and detailed profiles, but for walking his child to a school program. Of course, he joked, children aren’t dogs — he wanted the platform to feel safe and not overly transactional, centered on short-term care.
Lovable then spat out a few images of what the website may look like. From there, he built a user profile page, a booking system, and a prototype of a payment system. But he realized that vibe coding wasn’t so simple. The pages weren’t connected to each other, and many functions didn’t work. It cost him between $25 and $50 per month in Lovable credits.
As he built it out, Klipper realized that while vibe coding got him to a “great prototype,” he’d have to complete the final steps, which involved connecting Stripe to the website so trotters could receive their payment, himself. His knowledge of debugging and databases proved sufficient. He required trotters to enter their Social Security number and upload photos for verification. He did much of this work after midnight, he said.
Once he had the product finalized, Klipper blasted it out to parenting groups across Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn, and Hoboken in September. He also shared it in a WhatsApp group for all the first-grade parents in his son’s class.
Klipper said he took care to personally vet everyone on the platform. Trotters are required to enter their Social Security number and photos, and can upload a driver’s license, past experience, and CPR certification. Families can independently vet a trotter through a preliminary phone call or in-person meeting before deciding on one. Klipper said he is working on a verified trotter program with a more intensive background check.
“We’re really a facilitator of introducing these parents to these trotters, similar to a dating site,” Klipper said. In version 2.0, he hopes to “be stricter on who we want to add.”
Today, there are over 600 users of the web-based application, with more parents than trotters. So far, 149 total trots have been completed. Klipper said he capped the amount a trotter can charge at $25 for now as the company continues to scale and more families join. He added a paid tier for $8 a month with unlimited messaging, while trotters can pay $4 a month to get profiled or highlighted with a search.
Users have enjoyed the simplicity of the experience, the low cost compared to finding a nanny on Facebook, and the convenience, he said.
“This isn’t a money-making venture at this time,” Klipper said. “Everything right now is a cost. It’s a cost to pay for the vibe coding credits. It’s a cost for database storage.”
Klipper said he’s expanded Trot My Tot to cover older people who need help grocery shopping or getting to a doctor’s appointment.
On the side, Klipper said he vibe coded an app that scrapes the school menus off the Department of Education website and gamifies it for his children, allowing them to click on what’s for breakfast and lunch. None of his three platforms is perfect, he said, though none would have been possible even a few years ago.
“Every conversation I would have in college was like, ‘I have an idea for an app that should do this or do that,’ and no one could actually do it unless they spent thousands of dollars to pay a programmer to create it,” Klipper said. “This cuts that barrier down completely.”
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