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Why Homejoy Failed

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Re: Why Homejoy Failed

#291

Post by robotresearcher »

jonknee wrote: post #284
robotresearcher wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I checked the TOS and they do not guarantee the same individual.

But they make a point to allow you to book the same individual (or Professional in Handy parlance). https://www.handy.com/help#/315d90/a4db36/19c48c If they let you book a Pro and that Pro cannot make it on late notice, it is absurd to charge a late notice cancellation fee. At least Amex is great about not giving a shit about awful TOS. If you screw your customers over and accept Amex you'll soon find out that you wo…

No kidding about Amex. OP said they "did a chargeback for every dollar we ever spent with [Handy]". Wow.

Re: Why Homejoy Failed

#292

Post by Animats »

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…

If the service employed the cleaners as straight employees, they wouldn't have that problem. The service's value add for employees should be good scheduling and steady work. Merry Maids, the big company in the field and a unit of Servicemaster, does have their people as employees. Their problem, from reviews, is that many of their local managers are disorganized.[1] What they need are better tools for their people.

But you don't get to be a billion dollar unicorn by developing an in-house app for a house cleaning company.

[1] http://www.indeed.com/cmp/Merry-Maids/reviews?fcountry=US

Re: Why Homejoy Failed

#293

Post by tootie »

mikeash wrote: post #36
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…

It also solved a problem that's more or less already solved. Uber is great because finding a taxi can be hard, and finding a good taxi can be really hard. Finding somebody to clean your house is really easy. I must get half a dozen flyers a week for cleaning services stuck on my door. If I don't trust that, I can just ask my neighbors for a recommendation.

Finding a taxi in a big city is very easy and has always been very easy. I don't use Uber because they charge $10 for a car seat and I've never waited more than 10 minutes for car when I just call. When my company needed to send people 30 miles round trip every day for 2 weeks, a car service will give you a deal, Uber won't. Uber also has virtually no competitive advantage over Lyft. I think that all this startup analysis is giving way too little credit to the benefits of being lucky.

Re: Why Homejoy Failed

#294

Post by unclebucknasty »

mason55 wrote: post #176
navait wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to illustrate with a real example?

- Instead of giving away supplies, raise the percentage of the fee that you pay out. Then buy bulk supplies and sell them to the cleaners at a discount. - Partner with P&G and Unilever to get access to trial products that you can give to your cleaners to try - Act as an agent to negotiate group rates on stuff like health insurance - Provide business services if you book a certain number of appointments each year. Tax…

Those sound like good ideas, but I'm not sure they solve the key challenge of there being more value in the connection itself.

That is, once a service provider has a customer, that customer represents the overwhelming majority of value to be had by the service. Likewise, for a customer who is happy with and trusting of a cleaner, discounts would likely have to be unsustainably large to move them.

Finally, with the middleman in the transaction, discountability is actually eroded. There is really little economies of scale to be leveraged at the cleaners' level and customers would probably come out better if cleaners simply passed the Homejoy cut to them.

Re: Why Homejoy Failed

#295

Post by datashovel »

a3voices wrote: post #281
mattmanser wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the old bootstrap vs VC money argument, but bootstrapping doesn't work for a lot of business. You can't make an Uber or Google or Facebook or Twitter without VC money, it simply can't happen.

I disagree. You can make a Google without VC money if you start in 1994.

I actually think within the next 5-10 years companies that require scale like Google, Facebook, etc. will be possible at very low cost. Low enough even that the project can be bootstrapped without funding.

They of course won't start out at that scale, but given the ease with which one can scale cloud products (or have it done automatically for you via things like Elastic Beanstalk) and how cheaply it can be done, I will be surprised if within 10 years there won't be legitimate competitors to all of those companies that were formed in the hypothetical garage startup scenario.

Re: Why Homejoy Failed

#296

Post by hitekker »

apapli wrote: post #249

I'm reminded by a simple but powerful message one of my professors delivered to my MBA class a few years ago. "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…

"You can't just look for a gap in the market. You also need to verify there's a market in the gap."

I am remembering this. One of those quotes that simplifies but essentially explains a host of unsustainable businesses.

Re: Why Homejoy Failed

#297

Post by hugh4 »

matchagaucho wrote: post #244
jkyle wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Yep. But then you've got to ask yourself whether you've really got a business model that supports a big global company, as opposed to a business model that works best when you're one person in an office who has personal relationships with every cleaner in town and a flyer on every lamppost.

Re: Why Homejoy Failed

#298

Post by Elepsis »

FireBeyond wrote: post #258
potatolicious wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "no way in the UI to cancel the subscription" Handy isn't the only one, and this ought to be illegal. If I can sign up online I ought to be able to cancel online. These companies can lie to themselves and the public all they want - the exclusive purpose of making you call to cancel (or worse, visit a physical location) is to discourage cancellations. It compromises the notion of a free and voluntary exchange of mon…

LA Fitness has this one down to a fine art. You have to send a form, -by certified mail- to an address. They will not let you cancel in person, on the phone, or online. And if you send in the paperwork, but not by certified mail? They'll toss it, unactioned.

Sounds like a recipe to have most of your cancellations be via chargeback.

Re: Why Homejoy Failed

#299

Post by pdabbadabba »

dsl wrote: post #184
preinheimer wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I gave Handy(Book) a try, and consistency in who arrived was my issue. The first person they sent was absolutely fantastic, send her every week!. Trying to book her again was a nightmare, the docs didn't match the application, and support pointed me back at the documentation. Finally a month later, after several support calls and emails, I had the same cleaner booked. Success! The morning of my appointment I looked o…

Just had the same issue with Handy. They notified my girlfriend 20 hours before an appointment that our requested cleaner was unavailable, and when we canceled charged us $15 for canceling within 24 hours. After 4 different attempts to cancel we gave up and called American Express. They blocked Handy from charging the card again and did a chargeback for every dollar we ever spent with them.

Yep. Same story here. Cleaner didn't show up and Handy refused to refund my cleaning fee because the cleaner had attempted to contact me. (Apparently Handy does not find it relevant that I never received a call, nobody ever came to my house, and I am paying for cleaning not a phone call.) Eventually, after much back and forth, their customer service people simply stopped responding.

Against my better judgment, I attempted to book through them again the next week. Cleaner didn't show up and would not answer his/her phone.

On numerous prior visits the cleaner was very late and/or did a very poor job. Handy doesn't care.

This is a truly terrible service--one of the worst experiences I've ever had with a company.

Re: Why Homejoy Failed

#300

Post by frankdenbow »

matchagaucho wrote: post #244
jkyle wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Yep, thats what Thumbtack.com does.
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