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Didn’t Homejoy Shut Down?

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Re: Didn’t Homejoy Shut Down?

#61

Post by austenallred »

mc32 wrote: post #42
nostromo wrote: post #32

Everyone is assuming that the founders sold the company data to Fly Maids, a brand-new company nobody has ever heard of before. It's also possible one of the founders just spun up the new service themselves and copied over all of the customer records. If so, they may want to prepare to be sued by their previous investors. It's one thing to fail after giving it the good ol' college try, but it's another entirely to st…

As part of winding down they could have sold off their data to an interested party, not different from a merger, and they further could have hired some of the old team. If someone just copied the db and then sold or gave it on the sly, investors of former unaware, then, yes, problematic. But if it was a transaction approved by the principals of the former, unfortunately, there aren't stipulations about commutability…

They could have actually sold the entire company, so this is just a new skin on top of the old software.

Re: Didn’t Homejoy Shut Down?

#62

Post by austenallred »

phonon wrote: post #57
phonon wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also has the same address/registration number as the one in the privacy policy of http://cleanr.ca/ "a company incorporated in England and Wales (registration number 8883585) with its registered office address at 14 Whittonditch Road, Ramsbury, Marlborough, Wiltshire, United Kingdom, SN8 2PY."

Which is in fact "HOMEJOY EUROPE LIMITED"! https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/08883585

So the probably sold the whole company and reincorporated. I almost did a deal exactly like this today.

Re: Didn’t Homejoy Shut Down?

#63

Post by djur »

phonon wrote: post #57
phonon wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also has the same address/registration number as the one in the privacy policy of http://cleanr.ca/ "a company incorporated in England and Wales (registration number 8883585) with its registered office address at 14 Whittonditch Road, Ramsbury, Marlborough, Wiltshire, United Kingdom, SN8 2PY."

Which is in fact "HOMEJOY EUROPE LIMITED"! https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/08883585

Wild speculation: could they (Homejoy or whoever is liquidating them) be trying to salvage Homejoy's best markets by creating new cookie-cutter brands for each one and then trying to find a buyer?

Re: Didn’t Homejoy Shut Down?

#65

Post by johnsalzarulo »

lemevi wrote: post #29
johnsalzarulo wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the rip-off that put me over the top. I was so pissed I had to write the article.

I'm pretty sure them having the details Homejoy promised wouldn't be accessible is a much bigger deal, at least for me it is. If they have it, who else does?

It's sad, but I guess feel like my data isn't really secure anywhere.

Re: Didn’t Homejoy Shut Down?

#66

Post by TaylorGood »

Digging into trademarks, incorporations and S-1's is a weird little obsession of mine..

That said, my initial findings are that Flymaids is directly related to Homejoy. Under Privacy link of Flymaids it states "In the European Union, we are Fly Maids Europe Limited, a company incorporated in England and Wales (registration number 8883585) with its registered office address at 14 Whittonditch Road, Ramsbury, Marlborough, Wiltshire, United Kingdom, SN8 2PY."

If you lookup the registration number at Wales Companies House, it shows owner as "HOMEJOY EUROPE LIMITED"

https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/08883585

FWIW, they changed their registered address on 8/7/15, ten days short of their announcing to cease operations: http://bit.ly/1kbHtyJ

Re: Didn’t Homejoy Shut Down?

#68

Post by jball037 »

cornellwright wrote: post #24

Looks like the domain was registered on Oct 8th and I can't find "Fly Maids" or similar names on the Delaware Division of Corporations. (Maybe it takes longer for it to show up?) Either way super weird and creepy.

Any C-corp created in Delaware shows up their Entity Search (link below) almost instantly, e.g. within a few minutes of the company's creation.

That said, I looked on the Fly Maids webpage and they don't give the name of their corporation at all, they just show "© 2015 Fly Maids. All rights reserved." That means that "Fly Maids" could be a trademark, a fictitious name, owned by a corporation with a different name, or just owned by any random individual who hasn't registered his/her business. Another possibility is that Fly Maids is in fact registered as a corporation or LLC, but in a state other than Delaware. Yet another possibility is that "Fly Maids" is a fictitious name, and those are generally registered at the county in which they operate, and searching through each county's database would be an enormous task.

My point is: in any of the above cases it could be nearly impossible to figure out who is actually running this website. And failing to find a result in the Delaware Division of Corporations website really doesn't tell you much of anything.

And, as a relevant tangent: If you are really interested in finding out who owns/runs that website you could always sue Fly Maids. GoDaddy explicitly states in their Ts and Cs that they will give up owner information if there is a lawsuit brought against the owner...

----- Delaware Division of Corporations Entity Search link... https://icis.corp.delaware.gov/Ecorp/EntitySearch/NameSearch...

Re: Didn’t Homejoy Shut Down?

#69

Post by codezero »

gondo wrote: post #48

as someone mentioned in the blog comment, Fly Maids site is a complete copy (with redesigned homepage) of another cleaning service http://www.homeaglow.com/ @johnsalzarulo out of curiosity, try if your login works on homeaglow.com f.e.: both logos are served from the same S3 bucket: https://s3q1w2e3.s3.amazonaws.com/brands/logos/fly_maids.png https://s3q1w2e3.s3.amazonaws.com/brands/logos/homeaglow.png

Yep, also using the same Mixpanel ID and Google Analytics ID, which could be because of copying the entire thing, or because they're the same company, signs point to same company since they have assets with different company names in the same S3 bucket though!

Re: Didn’t Homejoy Shut Down?

#70

Post by JoblessWonder »

TaylorGood wrote: post #66

Digging into trademarks, incorporations and S-1's is a weird little obsession of mine.. That said, my initial findings are that Flymaids is directly related to Homejoy. Under Privacy link of Flymaids it states "In the European Union, we are Fly Maids Europe Limited, a company incorporated in England and Wales (registration number 8883585) with its registered office address at 14 Whittonditch Road, Ramsbury, Marlborou…

As I mentioned in another post, they don't seem to be actually registered in Deleware and there are typos related to find/replace (support@flymaids.com.com) so I'm not sure we can discount the chance someone just cut/pasted that from the original Homejoy privacy page. Homejoy's privacy page doesn't load and the wayback machine was blocked via robots.txt so we have no good way of checking that I can think of.

Also, nice to meet someone else obsessed with investigating incorporation documents. :)

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