15-Year-Old Running Real Life Babysitters Club Is Worth $375,000

Poor Kristy Thomas. It looks like her great idea isn’t so great anymore. Once a scion of the teen business set, the president of the fictional Babysitters Club has been outclassed by 15-year-old Noa Mintz, who’s been running a babysitting empire since she was 12.

Mintz, who lives in New York and gets all of her great ideas while at Soul Cycle, first started the service three years ago when she realized that parents could benefit from “highly engaged” caregivers instead of “nannies who were on their cellphones.” So she began recruiting, using her contacts at school (for short-term babysitting) and SoulCycle (for long-term nannying) as her product and charging families hundreds of dollars for a working match. Then, Mintz began taking a percentage of each nanny’s pay. While Time reports that she isn’t drawing a salary, her business had made $375,000 since it started, which is certainly enough to host a pizza party and buy a few kid kits.

Mitnz even has a CEO: A 26-year-old social worker (who’d originally applied to be one of Mintz’s army of nannies) named Allison Johnson, who’s taken over the company’s day-to-day while Mintz is hustling off at high school and making more money than any of her fellow students (and probably—no, definitely—her teachers). At first Johnson was a little disoriented taking orders from a teenager, but she’d adjusted and says that the two have developed “a groove.”

Mintz says this is just the beginning of her extraordinary career, which is, no doubt, bolstered by the fact that her father works in private equity and guided her way. But what he’s taught her about money seems less important as Mintz’s tireless work ethic. Sorry, Kristy: You’d better shut your ragtag band of babysitters down.