From what I gather from the other comments, it looks like most likely Homejoy's liquidator (Nortonsgroup) has sold Homejoy's user data to Homeaglow. Homeaglow copied and rebranded their own tech as Fly Maids to service this user list.
[deleted]
Didn’t Homejoy Shut Down?
121–130 of 361 posts
Re: Didn’t Homejoy Shut Down?
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is this a new policy? Because the company that prompted me to start the list, Zenefits, is still a Paul Graham darling: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/654377298234224640 Or, might be that our definitions of unethical don't match up 100%. I consider spam to be unethical, maybe you just mean more serious offenses.
This thread is about "selling customer data", not "cold outreach." But since you brought it up, cold outreach for B2B is not considered spam, as long as they comply with the following: https://www.leadfuze.com/cold-email-outreach-isnt-spam-heres... Not everything legal is ethical, but in this case it seems more annoying than unethical. I hate cold outreach emails and my company doesn't send them, but concluding that…
You're right, I've veered some discussion away from the original topic, sorry. I wanted to focus more on YC's role in this, if any.
(As my final word on it however, Zenefits specifically was not sending "cold outreach emails", it was bona-fide spam. But, they're far from alone in this anyway, which was my main point.)
Re: Didn’t Homejoy Shut Down?
#123as 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
It's not an uncommon practice to A/B test your branding, even your brand name. The other wesbite could be targeting a different market, different geography, etc.
The point is we just don't know at this point and perhaps we should refrain from doxxing the innocent until proven guilty.
Re: Didn’t Homejoy Shut Down?
#124I read this whole page of comments (when it was at 105) and gk1's comment is the only one that comes even close to what I'd like to see here:
> You're underestimating how far people are willing to go to appear legit. Showing logos of companies who aren't your clients -- or of publications that never mentioned you -- is common. They know most people won't check to verify.
...Along those lines: has anybody considered the possibility that the whole thing is an elaborate phishing site?
Here's an avenue for investigation which seems to be unexplored here: has Flymaids hired any maids, or contracted with them, or however that works?
Re: Didn’t Homejoy Shut Down?
#125I'm one of the founders of Homejoy. I'm still very passionate about the home service space. After leaving Homejoy, I started FlyMaids, where we're exploring a few different angles on the space.
We recently acquired the customer and service provider data from Homejoy.
We're a small team that has been focused on moving quickly while bootstraping. We tried to quickly test different approaches, but we realize now that we did so in an unclear manner. We recognize the need to use the data we acquired responsibily. As a result, we're taking the site down, and we're going to do a better job with our testing moving forward.
Re: Didn’t Homejoy Shut Down?
#126I'm one of the founders of Homejoy. I'm still very passionate about the home service space. After leaving Homejoy, I started FlyMaids, where we're exploring a few different angles on the space. We recently acquired the customer and service provider data from Homejoy. We're a small team that has been focused on moving quickly while bootstraping. We tried to quickly test different approaches, but we realize now that we…
I'm upvoting you to get your response attention. Don't mistake that for approval of what you did.
Re: Didn’t Homejoy Shut Down?
#127as 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
Same registration number, office address, etc.
> In the USA/rest of the world (excluding the European Union), we are Fly Maids, Inc. (doing business as Fly Maids), a Delaware corporation with our head office at 2711 Centerville Road, Suite 400, Wilmington, New Castle County, Delaware 19808. 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. We will refer to these companies together as "Fly Maids", "we", "us" and/or "our".
(http://www.flymaids.com/privacy)
> In the USA/rest of the world (excluding the European Union), we are Homeaglow, Inc. (doing business as Homeaglow), a Delaware corporation with our head office at 2711 Centerville Road, Suite 400, Wilmington, New Castle County, Delaware 19808. In the European Union, we are Homeaglow 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. We will refer to these companies together as "Homeaglow", "we", "us" and/or "our".
Re: Didn’t Homejoy Shut Down?
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
The liquidators have the power to dispose of the assets as they wish, in an attempt to return as much money to creditors (and the taxman) as possible. It's entirely possible that they've decided to try and keep some parts of the company active and have outsourced the dev work to a shady 3rd party. Alternatively they might be moving the sellable assets into a separate company which can itself be sold soon/later. Odds…
> Odds are that the founders weren't behind this move. Are you insinuating that someone other than Aaron Cheung sent the email from the top of the post? That seems... strange.
Well the issue appears to be settled it was Aaron Cheung:
Re: Didn’t Homejoy Shut Down?
#129I'm one of the founders of Homejoy. I'm still very passionate about the home service space. After leaving Homejoy, I started FlyMaids, where we're exploring a few different angles on the space. We recently acquired the customer and service provider data from Homejoy. We're a small team that has been focused on moving quickly while bootstraping. We tried to quickly test different approaches, but we realize now that we…
You're passionate about a "space"?
Re: Didn’t Homejoy Shut Down?
#130One of the comments on the article itself mentioned css being served seemingly from www.homeaglow.com, which was weird to me. So I did some investigating. Looking at the DNS of both flymaids.com and homeaglow.com, they both point to separate IPs (184.168.221.1 and 184.168.221.13 respectively), but have an additional CNAME to http://cleanerconnect.herokuapp.com.
Looking at the error on the heroku page directly, and comparing everything from the license info, help console, website copy, it seems that they are all the same company, operating under different brandings.
The privacy agreements are what really get me though. Looks like they are identical, except the brand names:
http://www.homeaglow.com/privacy
http://www.flymaids.com/privacy
And if you go to http://cleanerconnect.herokuapp.com and inspect the broken icon, you get "https://s3q1w2e3.s3.amazonaws.com/brands/logos/". Looking at the two sites' logos gets you the same URL, with an actual filename:
https://s3q1w2e3.s3.amazonaws.com/brands/logos/fly_maids.png
https://s3q1w2e3.s3.amazonaws.com/brands/logos/homeaglow.png
And the two domains/common backend makes sense, if it is really just a CNAME you could detect what URL the user hits and plug in a few variables. The different IP addresses on the A record are what confuse me, but I don't know much about DNS configuration.
But yes, it seems that flymaids and homeaglow are the same company. And I don't think it's a stretch that homejoy was among those as well.