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Why Homejoy Failed

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Re: Why Homejoy Failed

#71

Post by Retric »

sageabilly wrote: post #2

"The steady leak of its best workers to direct employment arrangements with its own (now former) clients." This is a huge hurdle in any direct services market. While you're not likely to hire your own private driver and thus end your working relationship with Uber, you're probably very likely to find a cleaner that you like a lot and who does a great job cleaning your house and go on to form an exclusive working rela…

Backfill is a useful feature that an app like this can provide. The problem is it's a small fraction of initial sales and has high customer acquisition costs.

It might work as a platform where they only take a cut of the first transaction. But, you’re still stuck with high customer acquisition costs and minimal repeat business.

The other option is to directly higher the cleaners so they don't defect. But, then you’re just running a cleaning business and competing with those who have minimal documentation.

Re: Why Homejoy Failed

#72

Post by brwnll »

tptacek wrote: post #57

But on this particular holiday, a booking had slipped through unnoticed, due to a website malfunction, according to a former employee. Rather than cancel an appointment at the last minute, Homejoy’s cofounder and CEO Adora Cheung grabbed a toilet brush and a vacuum cleaner. Then she headed to San Francisco’s Mission Dolores neighborhood and scrubbed. “The customer had no idea,” said Arjun Naskar, one of the earliest…

The snark us unwarranted here. The article explains that all employees went through a house cleaning during on boarding.

There are plenty of ceo/founders who would consider themselves not responsible for doing the dirty jobs that make a company work, particularly on a holiday such as thanksgiving (in the US, a very family-time centric holiday)

Re: Why Homejoy Failed

#73

Post by muzmath »

samstave wrote: post #60
untog wrote: post #25

I think this is a demonstration of the limits in "app-ing" an industry. Uber worked fantastically because it leans heavily on the geolocation facilities in a smartphone - you're always moving, getting picked up from different places, by cars located in different places. Homejoy had none of that. You rarely move home, and your cleaner rarely does either. Effectively, from transaction #1 you're in a perfectly replicabl…

For me it was price. I have three kids, so we do a lot of laundry. I simply wanted someone to fold and put away about twice a week... Home joys minimum worked out to be about $75 per visit... So about $37.5 per hour... And I don't think folding clothes as a service worth $600 per month.

You simply were never the target audience in the first place.

Re: Why Homejoy Failed

#74

Post by JohnBooty »

Mickydtron wrote: post #32
jdmichal wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Getting in a car is pretty much the most dangerous thing a person does in an average day. You may be trusting a cleaner with you possessions, but you're trusting that Uber driver with your life.

While this is statistically true, people don't act as if this were the case. While trusting someone with your physical safety should be a high-trust decision, we treat it cavalierly enough in our day to day lives that most people clearly don't worry about it. Maybe it makes sense, though, because the other person in the interaction has more incentive to defect when given access to all of your possessions than when gi…

     While trusting someone with your physical safety should be a 
     high-trust decision, we treat it cavalierly enough in our day 
     to day lives that most people clearly don't worry about it.
We just can't avoid it. We assume that nobody's poisoned our food, we assume that nobody is going to go suicidal on the roadways and ram themselves head-on into our car, we don't wear body armor to work because we assume our coworkers won't shoot us. We even assume that the anestheseologist at the hospital isn't housing a wicked hangover that will prevent him from doing his job.

Essentially our lives are in other peoples' hands pretty much 24/7!

Re: Why Homejoy Failed

#75

Post by eclipxe »

hammock wrote: post #46
untog wrote: post #25

I think this is a demonstration of the limits in "app-ing" an industry. Uber worked fantastically because it leans heavily on the geolocation facilities in a smartphone - you're always moving, getting picked up from different places, by cars located in different places. Homejoy had none of that. You rarely move home, and your cleaner rarely does either. Effectively, from transaction #1 you're in a perfectly replicabl…

I use a service called Handy (app-based home cleaning and handyman). It works fine. And doesn't seem to be struggling from what I can tell. https://crunchbase.com/organization/handybook/ edit: I'm in Chicago

Handy is horrible. Had really bad experiences with them

Re: Why Homejoy Failed

#76

Post by intrasight »

paulcole wrote: post #55
cballard wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one should be sitting "among employees" - everyone should be in a private office with a door that closes.

Wow, pretty sweeping generalization. You can't think of anyone who might prefer an open office arrangement, or you can't think of anyone like you who would prefer it?

I can't think of anyone

Re: Why Homejoy Failed

#77

Post by JoeAltmaier »

philh wrote: post #58
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This casual assumption that all housekeepers are thieves is galling. Its a kind of working-class bigotry that is tossed around by the entitled without even noticing they are doing it. Of course folks have plenty of incentive to not steal - they have self-respect.

You seem to be replying to a comment which has very little in common with the one I wrote.

Huh. The Uber driver could rob you too; they could rape or murder. They could kidnap. They have, really, far more opportunities to harm you. But the ol' housekeeper is alone in getting assumed to be a thief.

Probably this was not meant. But its been a hot button, the casual assumption that housekeepers are thieves, since forever. I guess I read that into the comment too readily.

Re: Why Homejoy Failed

#78

Post by repomies691 »

IgorPartola wrote: post #3

I read a comment on HN a while ago that went along the lines of "there is a new breed of startups that's in the business of selling dollar bills for 95 cents". I really like that formulation. Your job gets a lot easier as soon as you provide more value than you charge for it. Seems like that was one of the big problems with Homejoy: they were not able to charge more. The reality is that home cleaning is very price co…

I would prefer to hire some directly, and pay him directly, instead of suing this kind of site for that. Trustable, reliable cleaners have no abundance of work. This kind of website is good only for connecting yourself to the cleaners initially, but in the long-term I would be much more happy to just pay someone directly.

Also, everyone who uses home cleaning services usually uses them recurringly. I don't know what kind of value this kind of service can add, except in the initial "find the cleaner" part.

Re: Why Homejoy Failed

#79

Post by xacaxulu »

cballard wrote: post #21
forgetsusername wrote: post #7

> Adora Cheung opted to sit among employees, rather than in a swanky corner office. It's a pretty sad state when it's considered admirable and rare that the CEO of a company that is spending other people's money, and making none, doesn't have a "swanky" corner office.

No one should be sitting "among employees" - everyone should be in a private office with a door that closes.

If they are engineers/devs, I think they should at minimum have the option to close the door and get some work done, or at least have quiet spaces to work in from time to time.

Re: Why Homejoy Failed

#80

Post by kefka »

zeveb wrote: post #54
kefka wrote: post #26

The underlying question is "Does skirting employment law by using only 1099'ers make a profitable business solution?" In this case, the answer is no. But the general answer to that question is "Yes, it is very profitable to upend employment law for the profit of the few, on the backs of the many."

> But the general answer to that question is "Yes, it is very profitable to upend employment law for the profit of the few, on the backs of the many." Demand is not constant, but adjusts in response to price. Would a low-income worker rather be a zero-income worker, because no-one is willing to have him work for the wages your regulations demand?

All jobs have lulls and busy times. But what this comes down to is that employment law costs money. How much? Between $7000-$10000 per employee.

It's a no-brainer to cut out employment law and make the choice between "work crappy consultant job or don't work at all", that is, if you can sustain it. Homejoy couldn't, because of gross mismanagement and eventual reclassification by the IRS.

The ultimate goal is to remove all human labor from the market. UBER already came out with that statement: they want to automate their fleet as soon as possible. It's also the trend of every company to reduce labor, increase automated work, lower wages, and increase profits. Damned be the employees/consultants/1099's/hoi polloi.

Why am I against "Sharing economy"? I'm not. What I'm against is "What are we going to do with 50% unemployment?" Republicans can't even contemplate science, and are busy bickering about climate change. Democrats have only a basic view of 'workers good, companies bad', except when they are being funded. But still, the question remains is "How do we transition to an economy that can handle massive unemployment with a great deal of goods and profit being made?"

(Source: https://www.sba.gov/sites/default/files/The%20Impact%20of%20... PDF page 13, paper page 7)

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