101–110 of 410 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Going through Homejoy instead of direct offers you Homejoy's bonded protection and insurance, plus refund platform. This is worth something.
Sure, but is it worth their margin? The market resoundingly answered "no".
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…
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.
Housecleaning service has a lot of value to professionals and people with families, to be sure. But that service existed long before Homejoy, exists in more places than Homejoy ever served, and was served by plenty of providers not working through Homejoy even where Homejoy provided services.
I'm less convinced that Homejoy brought indispensable new value to the table for customers or cleaners.
I get the sense that many of the people involved in Homejoy are well-intentioned and hardworking. But I can't say that I think it's a bad thing that tech startups are finding it difficult to monetize unskilled labor. The technology that most companies like these offer (with the possible exception of Uber) is a commodity. The real asset they have is the network effect. Which makes the balance of power between the tech…
It appears from this article that recent worker classification lawsuits also had a part to play - http://recode.net/2015/07/17/cleaning-services-startup-homej...
Before uber, getting a taxi sucked. Talked to anyone who traveled extensively before uber, and they'll have plenty of stories about cabbies who tried to rip them off.
AirBNB is having similar success because getting a hotel also sucked - it was often overpriced, and the quality of the room often sucked, and as a consumer you didn't really have any feedback into the system.
But home services? Most people I know are able to mine their personal network pretty easily to find good home cleaning and home repair services. Or at least, it's a lot easier for them to do that than not get ripped off by a taxi driver.
These companies won't win in every industry "just because". In order for these companies to be successful, they have to bring some improved experience to the table that customers simply won't be able to live without once they've tried it.
Sad to see things come to an end for the team, though. I hope they find great success in whatever they pursue next.
For a house with 4 roommates, this service worked great as a solution to the "tragedy of the common [space]" problem. We've been using them for a year or more now and I'll be sad to see them go. I hope they follow through on putting people in touch with the actual cleaners.
How are you not in touch with the person who cleaned your house for a year?
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…
Recurring business is really tough when you're effective just introducing customers to other businesses. Thumbtack handles this by not even addressing the recurring aspect, and focusing on getting good introductions. Recurring revenue is great, but how does a matchmaking service continue to provide value once a good fit had been found?
Thumbtack also services a very wide range of verticals, which allows them to succeed purely as a matchmaker. It's an inherent flaw in what folks like Homejoy were doing (although they had aspirations of a larger vertical focus).
I need thumbtack like 3 or 4 times a year. I need Homejoy once ever.
They've raised almost $40M in funding: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/homejoy