61–70 of 410 posts
If your company cannot afford to stay in the black with real employees (as opposed to contractors), you need to re-evaluate your business model. Edit: and the downvotes are rolling in! Would anyone who has downvoted this comment care to share why?
The service was getting increasingly terrible in my market. I am not surprised at all to see it go the way of the dinosaur. Too bad, this type of service has a lot of value to busy professionals and people with families.
Where they failed was in providing an adequate supply of cleaners (no one available for weeks on occasion) and last-minute cancellations without substitutes.
Never did a cleaner solicit me to hire direct, but I DO think Homejoy should leave their customers with a way to reach the cleaners I did like for rehiring. Why not, after all?
I used Homejoy and I liked it's ease of use. But after the cleaning lady they sent me was done, she offered me her direct phone # and told me I could contact her directly for any future cleaning needs. I always wondered how this business model was going to work if Homejoy's contractors could just give out their phone # at the end of their first service and the customer could just contact them directly for any future…
This serves as a strong counterpoint to the infamous "Dear Future Homejoy Engineer" HN job posting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8794956 Working as a family on a holiday may not be enough to save a startup.
what happened?
Many stories about their problems, but here's one: http://fusion.net/story/142578/homejoy-uber-for-x-startups-m... And maybe the main one: http://recode.net/2015/07/17/cleaning-services-startup-homej...
It's one thing to sell your services at a loss while you're growing. In the home-cleaning business, though, there will never be a shortage of undocumented immigrants willing to work for less than minimum wage, quite possibly at a higher quality level. There would be no way to ever raise prices to fully cover costs without immediately losing out to that competition.
I used Homejoy and I liked it's ease of use. But after the cleaning lady they sent me was done, she offered me her direct phone # and told me I could contact her directly for any future cleaning needs. I always wondered how this business model was going to work if Homejoy's contractors could just give out their phone # at the end of their first service and the customer could just contact them directly for any future…
No surprise there. Tone-deaf marketing and there was a horror story a few years ago about the culture.
I never used the Homejoy service, but I was in the audience for the Startup School Europe talks last year where Adora gave a fantastic speech (Notes: http://theinflexion.com/blog/2014/07/26/notes-from-startup-s... ) about going through so many ideas and working so hard to get to Homejoy. The talk's ending had a 'And look, we made it, so you can too' feel, and I had no idea that they were doing anything but crushing i…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So then they didn't get paid and you didn't get a clean home? That seems like a loss for both parties. Also, Homejoy let you tip, with 100% of that money going to the cleaner(s). I usually gave the cleaners a 20% tip.
I would pay more for a professional cleaner. I have no idea what the experience level of the average Homejoy cleaner is but I had very mixed experiences when I used them.
I didn't have a single bad experience. The level of cleaning was the same as other services.