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Didn’t Homejoy Shut Down?

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Re: Didn’t Homejoy Shut Down?

#341

Post by otterley »

sulam wrote: post #316
brownbat wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

You're trusting that they or their acquirers will honor the contracts that they have with you. In the case of Homejoy, my assumption is that the claims/promises they made constitute a contract with their users that limits their ability to make use of your data outside the described scope. IANAL, but I think there's a reason we don't regularly hear about things like this - it's actually hard to do without getting sued…

A contract requires mutual consideration. Whatever someone says in their dying breath doesn't constitute a contract. A last will, perhaps, but not a contract. (To my knowledge, estate law does not apply to corporations.)

Re: Didn’t Homejoy Shut Down?

#342

Post by robhunter »

aarontcheung wrote: post #300
aarontcheung wrote: post #125

I'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 wanted to follow up and address some concerns mentioned in this thread, and acknowledge that I definitely made mistakes. How did you get my information? We acquired Homejoy’s domain and customer information through an ABC process. Our intention is to improve and then relaunch Homejoy’s cleaning service. We were testing a new model using Fly Maids, one of our testing brands. As evidenced today, we made some mistakes…

ABC process - http://bankruptcy.cooley.com/2008/03/articles/business-bankr...

Re: Didn’t Homejoy Shut Down?

#343

Post by 7Figures2Commas »

karlkatzke wrote: post #333
7Figures2Commas wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. 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…

Not to mention the people that the site content was stolen from. To me, this sounds like "As founder, I had access to all of Homejoy's data, so I just took it with me."

The founder says he acquired the data through an assignment for the benefit of creditors. I'm not an expert in ABCs, but my understanding is that the assignee in this process has a fiduciary duty to creditors and therefore must attempt to maximize the liquidation price of the company's assets. So I'm still curious as to how the twenty-something co-founder of the failed business acquired the data.

That aside, if we assume the data was acquired appropriately, it makes the questionable behavior[1] all the more baffling.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10468700

Re: Didn’t Homejoy Shut Down?

#344

Post by OJFord »

aarontcheung wrote: post #125

I'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 find it so hard to believe that anyone could possibly think going live with a total clone of a competitor's website for "testing" is a good idea.

Maybe, _maybe_, for offline testing with small focus groups. But even then, what's the point? You could just show them the competitor site and ask what the dis/like..

Re: Didn’t Homejoy Shut Down?

#345

Post by alexqgb »

akshatpradhan wrote: post #337
sulam wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're trusting that they or their acquirers will honor the contracts that they have with you. In the case of Homejoy, my assumption is that the claims/promises they made constitute a contract with their users that limits their ability to make use of your data outside the described scope. IANAL, but I think there's a reason we don't regularly hear about things like this - it's actually hard to do without getting sued…

Truth be told, they've probably got more experience than anybody else to make Homejoy 2.0 a much better product.

No they don't.

Why? Because the two thing you need to run a professional housecleaning service are access to people's houses and their credit card numbers. Maintaining this access demands far more judgement, care, and integrity than Aaron Cheung is ever likely to have.

Re: Didn’t Homejoy Shut Down?

#346

Post by alexqgb »

brownbat wrote: post #273
lemevi wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

No court or creditor can force you to rip off a competitor's site, only to festoon your version with fake coverage from the New York Times.

Re: Didn’t Homejoy Shut Down?

#347

Post by ihnorton »

otterley wrote: post #341
sulam wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're trusting that they or their acquirers will honor the contracts that they have with you. In the case of Homejoy, my assumption is that the claims/promises they made constitute a contract with their users that limits their ability to make use of your data outside the described scope. IANAL, but I think there's a reason we don't regularly hear about things like this - it's actually hard to do without getting sued…

A contract requires mutual consideration. Whatever someone says in their dying breath doesn't constitute a contract. A last will, perhaps, but not a contract. (To my knowledge, estate law does not apply to corporations.)

The consideration provided by HomeJoy's customers was, naturally, payment.

Re: Didn’t Homejoy Shut Down?

#348

Post by dang »

JonFish85 wrote: post #339
dang wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does it matter whether he twittered or hacker newsered? What a weird thing to bring up. More importantly, this is gratuitously personal. Stalking expeditions are not welcome on Hacker News, whatever one's opinion of the story at hand. Please don't do this on this site. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10467925 and marked it off-topic.

>More importantly, this is gratuitously personal. Stalking expeditions are not welcome on Hacker News, whatever one's opinion of the story at hand. Please don't do this on this site. I agree with your point that they are weird things to bring up, but how is that "stalking"? It's looking at 3 very public profile pages, which requires almost no effort to look at. Unless you've edited the post to remove information, tha…

I meant it metaphorically, but yes I'm sure there are better ways of putting it.

Sure, it's public data, but so are lots of things. When you search them out and compile them, you create something different than the scattered pieces. To do that and use it to attack somebody, or insinuate about them personally, crosses a line we shouldn't cross here.

I suspect crabasa meant no harm, was just being curious and participating in the discussion, but in these cases the group dynamic tends quickly to get a lot uglier than the sum of our individual motives.

Re: Didn’t Homejoy Shut Down?

#349

Post by chris_wot »

robhunter wrote: post #342
aarontcheung wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wanted to follow up and address some concerns mentioned in this thread, and acknowledge that I definitely made mistakes. How did you get my information? We acquired Homejoy’s domain and customer information through an ABC process. Our intention is to improve and then relaunch Homejoy’s cleaning service. We were testing a new model using Fly Maids, one of our testing brands. As evidenced today, we made some mistakes…

ABC process - http://bankruptcy.cooley.com/2008/03/articles/business-bankr...

Oh! That's what that is... Thanks for the link Rob.

Re: Didn’t Homejoy Shut Down?

#350

Post by chris_wot »

chris_wot wrote: post #326
aarontcheung wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wanted to follow up and address some concerns mentioned in this thread, and acknowledge that I definitely made mistakes. How did you get my information? We acquired Homejoy’s domain and customer information through an ABC process. Our intention is to improve and then relaunch Homejoy’s cleaning service. We were testing a new model using Fly Maids, one of our testing brands. As evidenced today, we made some mistakes…

Uh! This is making things worse, not better!!!! 1. You now acknowledge you intentionally lied to customers by saying you were redirecting them to a "partner", but it's the same company under a different name. 2. You don't hold that data under a payment provider like Stripe, and yet you claim to have PCI-DSS compliance but are violating it and risking a lot of customer credit card data! You now say you have deleted th…

robhunter has pointed out that ABC is something entirely different, and explained here: http://bankruptcy.cooley.com/2008/03/articles/business-bankr...
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