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Why Homejoy Failed

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Re: Why Homejoy Failed

#161

Post by irl_zebra »

williamstein wrote: post #132
scorchio wrote: post #64

The unnatural way Homejoy raised their seed rounds, with Cheung basically calling up Levchin and PG [1] was instrumental in setting up a failed business. This gave the startup undeserving social proof and let to the huge funding it should have never received. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVDmyRxeGCo&list=PLQ-uHSnFig...

tl;dr; summary of video -- "The theme that most people want me to talk about and which I will oblige today is ... how not to die in the context of a startup. ... Our goals (1) make people happy, (2) build a huge humungous business, which is a proxy for making a huge impact." She goes on to talk about how they spent years looking for the Homejoy idea since they did not have any personal problem that they cared enough…

>"The good news is that you only fail if you stop trying"

So when did HomeJoy stop trying?

Re: Why Homejoy Failed

#162

Post by EdiX »

zurn wrote: post #105
EdiX wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the Uber driver could rob you or worse, but they would also be guaranteed to get caught, so they probably won't do it. I think you are picking on a rather objective and dispassionate observation about incentives to take a grandstanding against classism, I appreciate the sentiment but the execution is flawed.

Modeling the behaviour of personal assailants from the POV of their rational risk-reward expectations does not match reality very well. They are largely people who are not in control of their impulses.

My impression is that it does for crimes committed against people the assailant is not related with.

Re: Why Homejoy Failed

#163

Post by gotchange »

This might be an unpopular opinion around here but having an MBA under the belt or at least some form of entrepreneurial intuition and business shrewdness is an indispensable skill esp. when you're planning on taking on a new category or market.

I know that this analysis is bit skewed to justify and reinforce the conclusion placed in the title and repeated throughout the piece, and as they say hindsight is 20/20, but I still think that the founders made big rookie mistakes when it came to structuring a viable and sound business model for their venture and securing a recurrent revenue stream that they would have avoided had they been equipped with professional business education, knowledge and expertise.

Re: Why Homejoy Failed

#164

Post by SilasX »

kefka wrote: post #50
prostoalex wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After a certain growth period it might be more cost-effective for a company to convert certain contractors to W-2 employees. Company can now mandate hours and keep a highly-rated worker from switching to a competitor. Homejoy never passed that "certain growth period", though. So it's not a clear-cut "contractors = good, employees = bad" thing. It's just that companies exploring these markets are all at early stage of…

Why would it be? I'm seeing a lot of reasons to bust "employment". Here's some. 1. Unemployment insurance? Well, you aren't employed. 2. Get hurt on the job? You're not on a job, 1099'er. 3. You "get" to pay the employer's tax as well as your own. Jokes on you, bub. 4. Want to join a union? They kill your account. 5. Real contracts can agree upon wages. How do you do this via Uber/Homejoy/"sharing job"? You don't. 6.…

All of those points apply equally well to any self-employed person. Should self-employment be abolished too?

To the extent that there's a problem, it's in the fact that the law doesn't treat the self-employed/other-employed spectrum sanely, such that employer incentives don't align with social goals. We should fix that, not demonize business that optimize for the current broken system.

Re: Why Homejoy Failed

#165

Post by gertef »

debacle wrote: post #160
ssharp wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care.com is doing similiar things with housekeeping services, although they started with matching child care providers to parents and seem to just be expanding into new verticles -- housekeeping, pet watching, etc. I think it's a good strategy. I'd rather use one app to handle those types of tasks than have to manager a Homejoy, Petjoy, and Kidjoy account.

The regulatory ecosystem around child care is much better and the baseline of quality control is much greater.

That's not true. The regulatory system surrounds day care centers, which is not care.com's business. care.com's business is in 1:1 care (nanny) where there is not regulation or quality control, except a bit of tax control.

Re: Why Homejoy Failed

#166

Post by tptacek »

tlb wrote: post #138
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 premise was more that services like Merry Maids charged a 300% markup on cleaner's labor, but Homejoy could charge 15% because they automated everything. Perhaps there are CEOs who've scrubbed exactly one toilet for the photo op. Cheung isn't one. She learned the job and led from the front. Some stories are here: http://www.femalefounderstories.com/adora-cheung.html

Most cleaning services aren't Merry Maids and aren't getting anything resembling 300%.

You're right: the Cheung story from that page is much more compelling than the one in the lede of this article. For those who haven't clicked through: Cheung and her partner started a cleaning service (with them as the cleaners), and Cheung took a job at a cleaning service to learn the ropes.

Re: Why Homejoy Failed

#167

Post by emmett »

cletus wrote: post #53

It can be pretty much boiled down to this one quote: > ...and the steady leak of its best workers to direct employment arrangements with its own (now former) clients. Services such as Homejoy create value by providing a market for the discovery of those seeking work with those seeking workers. For any regular type work the incentive for the employer and the employee (if you can call them that) is to cut out the middl…

And now I am sad again because cleaning service discovery is still broken. Not that you're wrong, just that it would be really nice to be able to find cleaners through a service with good reputation tracking and recommendation. Which is intrinsically difficult to build for exactly the reason you specify.

Re: Why Homejoy Failed

#168

Post by patio11 »

s73v3r wrote: post #139
patio11 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mild disagree here: the premium isn't coming from cleaners, it is coming from a hundred thousand or so local mom-and-pop operations which own one to five trucks. They hire substantially the same workers by demographics and do not appear to give their employees meaningfully superior compensation than the on-demand service companies. The model appears to be centralize lead generation nationwide, pool support resources,…

What value is there in national lead generation for something that is extremely local?

Economies of scale; national or worldwide brand recognition; improved efficiency of operations; leverage from applying top-tier marketing/etc talent to the problem.

Lead acquisition at a mom-and-pop agency is the 10% project of the owner or office manager or, at best, a local SEO/AdWords/etc agency. The platform companies, by comparison, can totally hire ten people with skills superior to mine to do it, as their only job.

Re: Why Homejoy Failed

#169

Post by debacle »

gertef wrote: post #165
debacle wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The regulatory ecosystem around child care is much better and the baseline of quality control is much greater.

That's not true. The regulatory system surrounds day care centers, which is not care.com's business. care.com's business is in 1:1 care (nanny) where there is not regulation or quality control, except a bit of tax control.

> where there is not regulation or quality control

In my state, you need to be licensed to provide child care. It looks like California and a few other states are similar.

Re: Why Homejoy Failed

#170

Post by landryraccoon »

JohnBooty wrote: post #66
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.

Lives are infinitely more valuable them possessions. If an Uber driver wanted to hurt you, he would be extremely likely to pay the legal price. After all, there's an electronic paper trail of the ride he gave you. So an Uber driver won't do that unless he's essentially insane and a) doesn't understand this or b) has nothing to lose and doesn't care if he's caught or c) thinks he can get away with it because you're in…

Also the Uber driver can't easily injure you without injuring himself and his car.
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