231–240 of 410 posts
Is this why they had to terminate their operations because clients and partners managed to cut them out of the loop and to do business independently of their platform?
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…
The magical secret to its success: the cleaner that would visit your home was an employee, not a contractor. That meant the company could control and guarantee the quality of the service provided and would be able to have its cleaners sign non-competes if necessary.
So 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…
Exactly this. I always felt that this was just another doomed startup that couldn't possibly survive. Curious how we'll revise our views on the company and Adora. I guess this is the playbook, right? Doesn't matter if you build a sustainable company or not. As long as you raise crazy amounts of VC $ you're considered a success.
Home cleaning is a well established business. The market is well served by multiple traditional companies. A Bootstrap 3.0 website and mobile app aren't really going to change that much. It's an uphill battle and trying to take the Uber model of skirting worker protection laws is your only real source of competitive advantage over time.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Courtesy and passion are different things. Let's not devalue the word.
You're mistakenly drawing a parallel between the two words. I am saying a cashier that is not passionate about their job is not _entitled_ to be uncourteous and therefore act unprofessionally.
In particular, I'm worried about judging people to be unprofessional simply because they are dispassionate. They are separable.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 that's rather optimistic of you. Don't get me wrong there currently very popular and profitable so they don't need to worry about a Pets.com style crash. However, the barriers to entry are relatively low just look at Lyft. Eventually investors are going to want to get their money back, so they either start issuing dividends or face a hostile takeover.
Are they? Everything I've read indicates that they are not.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2015-06-30/uber-loses-m...
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…
I'm surprised they didn't offer to transition/sell their customers to Handy... that's prolly mid-tens of dollars in lead-gen fees off an active customer list of... thousands of customers probably (as well as a less-active list prolly in the tens of thousands range)?
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…
A prediction about "sharing economy" companies. Almost all of them are tacking on a thin rind of web/mobile UI and smart dispatch technology to an existing service. The long-term winners will be companies like Flywheel that recognize this and focus on providing that service to existing operators, much like payment processors. This, of course, is perceived as a smaller market since they can't count revenue the same wa…
But dispatch services where worker-customer relationship can evolve into long-term are indeed not adding much value outside of the original lead generator.
I 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.
I don't think it's reasonable to require cleaners to be that enthusiastic, but I don't really see why somebody should feel less proud about making things nicer through cleaning than I do about achieving similar ends through coding.
Is this the beginning of the end of the on-demand bubble?
There is a qualitative difference between this and other on-demand services such as Uber in that you will never see the "here is my phone number" phenomenon in Uber.