What is the urge to hijack scrolling so high? Is it because people who those developers work for have shitty mouse/trackpad?
Homejoy says goodbye
221–230 of 410 posts
Re: Homejoy says goodbye
#222I 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…
If this sunk them I am shocked that no one saw this coming. I asked about this on HN over a year ago [0]. There are 2 things they could have done.
1. Hire and provide real value to the cleaners contract Uber to drive the cleaners to the houses, That would have solved the classification issue and the middle man issue
2. Charge the cleaners to be on the site, let verified purchasers leave reviews, and offer an optional payment gateway.
Re: Homejoy says goodbye
#223Looks like Google may have picked up some of the team:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9904483
So not ALL that bad.
Re: Homejoy says goodbye
#224I wanted HomeJoy to work and tried to use the service a few times. What the failure came down to: 1. The cleaners were not professionals. It felt like they were just recruiting anyone who wanted a job. You could really feel this with the lack of passion from the cleaners and the severe lack of quality cleaning. Most of the people complained and were quite rude sometimes. Cleaning is very much a skill as much as it is…
> the lack of passion from the cleaners I doubt cleaning other people's shit is anyone's passion.
You'd be surprised.
My Parents use AirBnb to rent out an in-law apartment they have at one of their houses (they each had a house prior to getting together). They're retired and they now treat it like their job, despite it only bringing in around $30k/year. I've recommended that they find a local cleaning person since I think they can find someone good who's willing to do it for the cleaning fee they charge ($50), but they're finicky about it being done perfectly and value their star rating (full 5 stars). So they do it themselves before every new renter arrives. Sometimes this involves driving 1.5 hours in each direction just to go up there and clean, but they insist on doing it anyways.
Similarly, I used to have a cleaning person come once a month. She was an immigrant single parent who had built up a large number of loyal, repeat clients and was making enough to send her daughter to college. Doing our dishes and vacuuming our floors probably didn't provide much enjoyment, but you can bet your ass she did it passionately because of the larger context in which she was working.
You're probably right about the actual act of cleaning...almost everyone won't have a passion for that. But your comment is incredibly myopic and shows a complete lack of understanding of human motivation.
Re: Homejoy says goodbye
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the lack of passion from the cleaners I doubt cleaning other people's shit is anyone's passion.
People can take pride in all sorts of work.
Yeah, but complaining their cleaner wasn't "passionate" mostly comes off as being pissy your poorly-paid short-term menial labor didn't fluff your ego enough for being so awesome to pay him or her.
You can do a perfectly good job cleaning without pretending you're so passionate about cleaning you'd just love to do it for free! (I have similar complaints about development jobs, btw -- you can do a perfectly good job and be a great employee whilst not pretending it's anything but a job, and you're doing it because you get paid, and if you weren't getting paid, you'd be seeing family/friends/dog/beach/mountains/woods/recreation of choice / etc.)
Re: Homejoy says goodbye
#226what happened?
The biggest is probably that the home care industries operate on such a shoe string budgets that there really isn't all that much room for a middleman to take a cut. This isn't taxis where you can bank on regulatory arbitrage to take a cut. They seemed to be trying to make money on customer acquisition and scheduling, but I'm sure they realized too late that their partner companies don't spend a huge amount of money…
> This isn't taxis where you can bank on regulatory arbitrage to take a cut.
If anything, the incumbents are better positioned to arbitrage the law/regulations in this case. An online service like this leaves a paper trail, which makes it much harder to use the "shortcuts" common in the cleaning industry: use of undocumented immigrants, underreporting of taxable income, etc. Much easier to do that in a pure cash business with informal booking.
Re: Homejoy says goodbye
#227They've raised almost $40M in funding: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/homejoy
According to Recode article they were looking to raise more money.
Am curious how could they have burned $40mil in ~1.5 years..
Re: Homejoy says goodbye
#228So Forbes named Homejoy one of the hottest startups of 2013 (and they make a 30 under 30 list). They raise money from top-tier VCs and angels. Adora does quite a bit of speaking (it seems) on growth, regional expansion, and startup inspiration. They expanded to 30+ markets. But they were really just selling cleaning services for below cost–on the backs of 1099 workers. It's a worse model than Groupon and I can't fath…
I firmly believe this business model can work. I know of a local business that is going into its 6th year of operations. Cleaning houses is a large part of their revenues. They match house cleaners, handymen, grocery shoppers, cooks and assistants with professionals starved for time. The model is subscription-based and they have some large companies which give out these subscriptions as a bonus/perk to their employees.
Perhaps Homejoy expanded too fast? They overdosed on funding? Deadlines and progress meetings became too dreadful? Or maybe there are regulatory issues they could not resolve?
I think there is more to this than a shoddy business model imitating Pets.com.
Re: Homejoy says goodbye
#229I think the key differentiator between successful "uber for X" companies and unsuccessful ones will end up being the customer experience in the industry each company attacks. 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…
My experience is the opposite: finding a good cleaner is harder than finding a taxi or a good hotel.
Sure, you can ask all your friends for recommendations for cleaners, but the good ones are always fully booked.
Re: Homejoy says goodbye
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
Defaults can change really quickly. Unlike Facebook Uber has basically zero network effect between cities. So, a competitor can win one or two small cities and just keep growing. Consider there are only 40,000 taxi drivers in New York. All it takes is for a company to find the top 5-50% of Uber/Lift drivers in a city offer them a minimum income of a few k/month assuming they take A% of rides and work y hours and boom…
If Uber "pops" it will be because the ride sharing industry died. There is no scenario where Uber becomes MySpace to a competitor.
> There is no scenario where Uber becomes MySpace to a competitor.
Sure there is - the IRS says their drivers are employees and they need to provide multiple years worth of backpay/benefits. Any competitor that's been doing that already wins.