241–250 of 342 posts
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I've been lurking on this thread waiting for someone to mention that post. I'm really surprised it took this long.
Me too dude. I actually -F'd it and was surprised I was the first. Then again it's 4pm in NY, let alone SF. The night is young...(if the HN algo doesn't tank the story, that is).
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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.
Rover.com is great for pet sitting, and care.com is great for finding a home care provider. However both of these sites will have the same problem as Homejoy. I used rover.com to book pet sitting just for the insurance, but after a few positive experiences, I am now booking directly with the pet sitter. Same thing happens on care.com almost all the time. These sites are more valuable as a craigslist or angie's list c…
Furthermore, they're doing the typical thing that businesses resort to when they're desperate. They're asking you to review every single damn time you use their service. (I had the same sitter for 30 weeks in a row. Clearly I like her or I'd use someone different. Stop bugging me!)
They also try to steer you towards using their service more when there's no need for it. Every time I book a stay, they want me to look into other pet sitters on their site. Why would I do that? I'm completely happy with the one I found. If I ever need a change because I move or the sitter moves, or we have a falling out, I'll consider looking for a new one. Until then, get out of my face!
And on top of it, they're trying to push services I don't need. I never want someone to come to my house to walk my dog. I don't need strangers coming by my house. And I need an overnight maybe 3 times a year. (And I'll continue to use the day sitter I have as they also do overnights.) It's almost impossible to find a day sitter on rover.com, and they seem to be pushing everything but that.
Their whole model seems like it's living on borrowed time to me.
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Me too dude. I actually -F'd it and was surprised I was the first. Then again it's 4pm in NY, let alone SF. The night is young...(if the HN algo doesn't tank the story, that is).
The link back to the HN post, and the subsequent resurface of the post in HN comments on a related NYT article, are already in TFA.
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…
> Effectively, from transaction #1 you're in a perfectly replicable pattern - Cleaner X comes to your house every Y weeks and works for Z hours. This is the key failure. Anyone's whose regularly procured cleaning services knows the dance. You find a reputable cleaning service, they send out a cleaner. If you don't like them, you keep asking for a different one. When you find one you like, you ask them what they'd cha…
This is effectively the yellow pages model, where cleaners pay for leads via advertising placements, and own the long-term relationship with the customer.
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I've noticed this even with Groupon. Walk into place with a Groupon, they offer you the same price but just bypass Groupon. They get a new customer in the door, the customer is fine with it because it's the same price, but the business makes more money because they don't have to pay Groupon their cut.
How would that work? Groupon takes their cut when the the customers pay for the deal itself, days or weeks ahead of them showing up at the business.
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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)
Again: the premise of the business is that there's a premium to collect on top of the work of housekeepers, who generally do that job because it is the only way they can scrape by, and that the premium should be assigned to people who can code. The article's author thinks that performing the gig once is somehow an illustration of a startup founder's determination. I winced.
Anyways, who picks up their phone and fires up an app to demand that someone comes over and cleans up their house, right f-ing now!
I also suspect that the "on boarding" process of learning to clean probably didn't filter out the candidates that were really passionate about the business so much as it found the ones that would put up with just about anything. I don't know too many top tier developers that would do that. I do value the concept that everyone should understand the dirty work but this particular case might be outside the useful realm of that.
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No way. If I'm paying someone less than 100$ to come in to a place where they could walk out with $10K+ worth of electronics, jewelry, etc I either need to be there to supervise or have a long standing relationship with the person. Ideally I would like to know enough of their other clients that a single robbery doesn't make economic sense for them. Once the relationship exists the agency brings minimal value.
That statement is conditional that you're paying the person less than $100. What if the highly qualified employee from Homejoy was for $200-$250?
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> Effectively, from transaction #1 you're in a perfectly replicable pattern - Cleaner X comes to your house every Y weeks and works for Z hours. This is the key failure. Anyone's whose regularly procured cleaning services knows the dance. You find a reputable cleaning service, they send out a cleaner. If you don't like them, you keep asking for a different one. When you find one you like, you ask them what they'd cha…
So, is a "one time referral fee" business model the key to success? This is effectively the yellow pages model, where cleaners pay for leads via advertising placements, and own the long-term relationship with the customer.
"You can't just look for a gap in the market. You also need to verify there's a market in the gap."
Homejoy most likely saw opportunity in the first sentence, but it appears they may not have spent time thinking about the second (or didn't research a broad enough segment of the market).
'Disrupting' a market isn't simply about creating a mobile app, or a 'marketplace' for service X after all. That's just a game of buzzword bingo.
Why Homejoy failed: > "We didn’t figure out how to deliver a consistently high-quality service" The review sites agree and so does their churn rate. If you don't have a high quality service, you don't have anything. Trying to hack growth numbers with Groupons and extreme discounts while ignoring retention numbers demonstrates a lack of respect for the dynamics (basic math) and suggests expectations of a 'silver bulle…