NEW YORK — With the Internet replacing the old “word of mouth,” it only makes sense that the search for baby sitters has gone online.

Yet, when Sittercity.com founder Genevieve Thiers sought investors to start her company — a sort-of Match.com for parents and baby sitters — she was laughed out of the room.

The business of baby-sitting? Paid by moms with cash out of the cookie jar? No one took her seriously.

“I went to some venture capitalists and an angel investor as well,” Thiers recalls. “But they all basically said ... I have no idea what you’re talking about, my wife handles all of this, I don’t get it.”

SELF-STARTER

It seemed, as usual, that the mostly male corporate world didn’t understand the value of what is mainly women’s work.

“And so I never actually received any startup capital at all. I founded the Web site completely on my own salary from IBM,” she says, referring to her previous job. “I took everything I made.”

It has paid off. From her initial startup of $20,000 four years ago, Sittercity.com last year raked in about $1.2 million — all of it plowed back into the company for more salaries, more marketing and more outreach. The Chicago-based firm now has 11 full-time employees, and it projects revenue to reach $3 million this year as it seeks to spread nationwide.

Launched in September 2001, “it has been profitable since the second month,” Thiers says. It currently lists 150,000 sitters and has 20,000 parents as members.

Among them is Jodi Hutchison, a mother of two in Madison, N.J., who works for Time Warner in New York. “I have found the greatest baby sitters through that site,” she says. “For a working mom it is so completely efficient and easy to use. I love it. I don’t know how I’d find baby sitters otherwise.”

When she found herself needing a new baby sitter last spring, “I asked around — I asked my dentist, I asked my haircutter, I asked anybody that I came in contact with: Do you know anybody? ... and I got nothing back, so I was in a panic.”

She saw a flier for Sittercity.com as she was posting her job opening at a college campus, “and I thought: That’s a great idea! You can do everything on the Web — you can get your groceries on the Web, you can find a mate on the Web, you can do your banking on the Web. Why not find a baby sitter on the Web? Of course!”

“I’ve referred all my working mom friends,” she adds. “Five, six other moms have called me back to say: That was a lifesaver.”