111–120 of 342 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No one should be sitting "among employees" - everyone should be in a private office with a door that closes.
Wow, pretty sweeping generalization. You can't think of anyone who might prefer an open office arrangement, or you can't think of anyone like you who would prefer it?
https://signalvnoise.com/posts/3357-an-office-with-ldquolibr...
I think this is a demonstration of the limits in "app-ing" an industry. Uber worked fantastically because it leans heavily on the geolocation facilities in a smartphone - you're always moving, getting picked up from different places, by cars located in different places. Homejoy had none of that. You rarely move home, and your cleaner rarely does either. Effectively, from transaction #1 you're in a perfectly replicabl…
I use a service called Handy (app-based home cleaning and handyman). It works fine. And doesn't seem to be struggling from what I can tell. https://crunchbase.com/organization/handybook/ edit: I'm in Chicago
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You simply were never the target audience in the first place.
In general, in Western economies, personal services that don't benefit significantly from scale or automation are going to seem reasonably expensive unless you are in the very top tier of income. Consider that $15/hour is about the wage floor and you probably need to add transit time and other overheads for an independent contractor. So, yeah, it's hard to see a couple of hours of work costing less than $50 or so. An…
I think this is a demonstration of the limits in "app-ing" an industry. Uber worked fantastically because it leans heavily on the geolocation facilities in a smartphone - you're always moving, getting picked up from different places, by cars located in different places. Homejoy had none of that. You rarely move home, and your cleaner rarely does either. Effectively, from transaction #1 you're in a perfectly replicabl…
I use a service called Handy (app-based home cleaning and handyman). It works fine. And doesn't seem to be struggling from what I can tell. https://crunchbase.com/organization/handybook/ edit: I'm in Chicago
http://thebillfold.com/2014/10/my-day-interviewing-for-the-s...
I read a comment on HN a while ago that went along the lines of "there is a new breed of startups that's in the business of selling dollar bills for 95 cents". I really like that formulation. Your job gets a lot easier as soon as you provide more value than you charge for it. Seems like that was one of the big problems with Homejoy: they were not able to charge more. The reality is that home cleaning is very price co…
"there is a new breed of startups that's in the business of selling dollar bills for 50 cents and the bills are counterfeit. Cash out before we're caught."
It really says it, considering that much of the VC groups not only allow breaking the law, but encourage it in the name of "progress". And you know, who cares about the worker anyways. They're replaceable (until the specific AI comes and takes that job.)
I think this is a demonstration of the limits in "app-ing" an industry. Uber worked fantastically because it leans heavily on the geolocation facilities in a smartphone - you're always moving, getting picked up from different places, by cars located in different places. Homejoy had none of that. You rarely move home, and your cleaner rarely does either. Effectively, from transaction #1 you're in a perfectly replicabl…
I use a service called Handy (app-based home cleaning and handyman). It works fine. And doesn't seem to be struggling from what I can tell. https://crunchbase.com/organization/handybook/ edit: I'm in Chicago
Postmortems like this are always a bit unfair. You ask employees who lost their job when the company folded what was wrong with the company, and they'll air every little complaint or inefficiency that existed within the company. Isn't the ethos of Silicon Valley to 'hack it together' with tape and glue? Moreover, I'm pretty sure that's the reality of almost every high growth company. I'm sure you could find matching…
Couldn't that be the problem, too?
The unnatural way Homejoy raised their seed rounds, with Cheung basically calling up Levchin and PG [1] was instrumental in setting up a failed business. This gave the startup undeserving social proof and let to the huge funding it should have never received. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVDmyRxeGCo&list=PLQ-uHSnFig...
Without specific reference to any company, "Convincing an investor to invest in a company which is not, at the present moment in time, either profitable or cashflow positive" is not in any way exceptional or unnatural. That's the nature of the game in early stage investing. They're all high-risk companies which, if you simply linearly project out where they are today, will "default to dying" (to use PG's phrasing). S…
The initial seed round gave Homejoy more rocket fuel than was natural. I watched the speech live, and at the time I felt that Homejoy was a Mini with a jet engine. It was imbalanced and was likely to blow up.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The initial value is the piece of mind on the customer side plus ease of use/scheduling. With maid service, you're letting someone in your house unsupervised for long periods of time, so it becomes extremely important to have accountability built into the transaction. I have considered getting a monthly maid service and I live in the DC metro- somewhere with a ton of choices on that front- and I have not quite pulled…
Couldn't you get someone to clean while you're home watching football on Sunday or something? I don't see why it has to be totally unsupervised.
"The steady leak of its best workers to direct employment arrangements with its own (now former) clients." This is a huge hurdle in any direct services market. While you're not likely to hire your own private driver and thus end your working relationship with Uber, you're probably very likely to find a cleaner that you like a lot and who does a great job cleaning your house and go on to form an exclusive working rela…