271–280 of 361 posts
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Why did you copy Handy's site verbatim? Why did you not give customers the option to opt-in to your new venture? Why did you post the logos of news organizations that had never written you up?
The answer to all of those questions is: they are dishonest.
I'm pretty sure I know what's going on. In order to pay off their debts, Homejoy must have sold user account information, including credit cards, to a bunch of local home cleaning businesses. A shit ton of them have been popping around over the past couple of years, modeled after the advice given in this subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/entrepreneurridealong The difference with these local cleaning businesses is t…
How is it possibly legal to sell credit card details to a third party?
It's not clear to me that the same intuition applies if the Alltel equivalent is shutting down because it was mismanaged, and the Verizon equivalent was created by one of the mismanagers and has no other assets, but it's hard for me to imagine there's a meaningful legal distinction.
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The answer to all of those questions is: they are dishonest.
> We recently acquired the customer and service provider data from Homejoy. That's all you really need to know about FlyMaids and Homejoy. If I ran a startup into the ground I would never ever betray my customers by selling their data!
When you run a business into the ground, some decisions about what you sell get taken over by courts, at the direction of your creditors.
When you trust your data with a company, you're not just trusting its ethics, you're trusting its long term viability too.
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Why did you copy Handy's site verbatim? Why did you not give customers the option to opt-in to your new venture? Why did you post the logos of news organizations that had never written you up?
They're doing things that don't scale (aka hacking/hustling).
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Did YC ever disavow InstallMonetizer? (honest question)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5092711
At the time, I remember being incredibly disappointed to see him hide behind the EULA and "This one seems a matter of opinion." That's why it came to mind immediately and I was curious if YC ever took a more respectable position in the interim.
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Doesn't look like it is stored (only) with Stripe. The profile section of the site (per the blog post screenshot) displays some of the credit card info.
Stripe's API returns the last four digits for a tokenized card so you can display them to users.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why did you copy Handy's site verbatim? Why did you not give customers the option to opt-in to your new venture? Why did you post the logos of news organizations that had never written you up?
They're doing things that don't scale (aka hacking/hustling).
I'm surprised that BusinessInsider still doesn't have an article about this. Shame on you Business Insider! It's already been an hour! I expect a headline "How Homejoy came back from grave to haunt us"
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> We recently acquired the customer and service provider data from Homejoy. That's all you really need to know about FlyMaids and Homejoy. If I ran a startup into the ground I would never ever betray my customers by selling their data!
> If I ran a startup into the ground I would never ever betray my customers by selling their data! When you run a business into the ground, some decisions about what you sell get taken over by courts, at the direction of your creditors. When you trust your data with a company, you're not just trusting its ethics, you're trusting its long term viability too.
This is true, but a lot of this "story" still seems strange, especially in light of the fact that all of the sites that appear to be associated with Cheung's new venture have been taken offline.
There are a number of well-funded players in this space, some of which might have an interest in acquiring Homejoy's data. How did the twenty-something co-founder of the failed business come to acquire the data? Did outside investors provide funding for the new venture and its acquisition of the data? Were any of those investors also investors in Homejoy? Why weren't former Homejoy customers simply informed that another company had acquired their information in an honest, transparent fashion (the way most companies handle transactions of this nature)?
It's worth pointing out that the email Cheung sent to former Homejoy customers about FlyMaids stated that FlyMaids "work[s] with Homejoy's best cleaners."
If that is true, it would appear this new venture is essentially just Homejoy reincarnated, begging questions about Homejoy's liabilities. Assuming the lawsuits against Homejoy haven't settled, I'd imagine the attorneys behind those lawsuits might have an interest in what's going on.