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Why Homejoy Failed

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Re: Why Homejoy Failed

#31

Post by prostoalex »

saalweachter wrote: post #13
sageabilly wrote: post #2

"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…

I think it's an important question any entrepreneur has to answer: what value do I add to the business? If you're providing some expertise or startup costs to purchase expensive investments (buildings, machinery...) or creating some sort of efficiency of scale, you've probably got a viable business. If your business plan is to skim money off of workers who could do their jobs and get paid without you, your workers ar…

> If your business plan is to skim money off of workers who could do their jobs and get paid without you

Lead generation is a viable business, as demonstrated by Yelp (and previously Yellow Pages), it's just not hot and fast-growing.

Re: Why Homejoy Failed

#32

Post by Mickydtron »

jdmichal wrote: post #8
cm2187 wrote: post #5

The difference with Uber is that it requires a lot more trust to give someone access to your home while you're away to clean it. Not sure I would want to subscribe to a service where I would have to trust any local dude to visit my home. It's like a nanny. Picking someone to look after your kid is a very personal thing. It's not a lowest bidder thing.

Getting in a car is pretty much the most dangerous thing a person does in an average day. You may be trusting a cleaner with you possessions, but you're trusting that Uber driver with your life.

While this is statistically true, people don't act as if this were the case. While trusting someone with your physical safety should be a high-trust decision, we treat it cavalierly enough in our day to day lives that most people clearly don't worry about it.

Maybe it makes sense, though, because the other person in the interaction has more incentive to defect when given access to all of your possessions than when given control over you yourself. That is, you have little reason to think that the Uber driver is working at cross purposes to you, and mainly just have to take their competence on faith. With something like Homejoy, it is their character and motivation you are gambling on moreso than their competence.

I haven't heard of people abusing Homejoy to rob houses or anything, but it seems not entirely stupid that someone would worry about bad actors more than incompetent ones.

Re: Why Homejoy Failed

#33

Post by TheCondor »

sageabilly wrote: post #2

"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…

Taxis have been tampered with. There are medallions and monopolies and such, the fair market hasn't reigned. Uber can change that, there is room to wiggle.

Has cleaning been unionized or tampered with? If anything, I'd almost think it's shifted further to the other side, there might be undocumented workers and more cash businesses than taxis have, even less regulation if you will.

If the market is working, then what's the value? They help customers find cleaners more efficiently? More efficiently than Craig's list and the other sources?

Re: Why Homejoy Failed

#34

Post by philh »

forgetsusername wrote: post #11
cm2187 wrote: post #5

The difference with Uber is that it requires a lot more trust to give someone access to your home while you're away to clean it. Not sure I would want to subscribe to a service where I would have to trust any local dude to visit my home. It's like a nanny. Picking someone to look after your kid is a very personal thing. It's not a lowest bidder thing.

> The difference with Uber is that it requires a lot more trust to give someone access to your home while you're away to clean it. In one case you're risking personal items and privacy; in the other your life is actually in that person's hands.

With a driver, your life is in the hands of someone who has nothing to gain from getting in a car crash. With a cleaner, your possessions are in the hands of someone who might have plenty of incentive to steal your stuff and sell it.

Re: Why Homejoy Failed

#36

Post by mikeash »

untog wrote: post #25

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…

It also solved a problem that's more or less already solved. Uber is great because finding a taxi can be hard, and finding a good taxi can be really hard. Finding somebody to clean your house is really easy. I must get half a dozen flyers a week for cleaning services stuck on my door. If I don't trust that, I can just ask my neighbors for a recommendation.

Re: Why Homejoy Failed

#37

Post by andy_ppp »

forgetsusername wrote: post #11
cm2187 wrote: post #5

The difference with Uber is that it requires a lot more trust to give someone access to your home while you're away to clean it. Not sure I would want to subscribe to a service where I would have to trust any local dude to visit my home. It's like a nanny. Picking someone to look after your kid is a very personal thing. It's not a lowest bidder thing.

> The difference with Uber is that it requires a lot more trust to give someone access to your home while you're away to clean it. In one case you're risking personal items and privacy; in the other your life is actually in that person's hands.

People are more scared of burglary than car crashes.

Re: Why Homejoy Failed

#38

Post by prostoalex »

ghaff wrote: post #4

After reading this, I'm left to ponder why anyone would think this was a potential "unicorn" business where it made sense to take big losses to grow revenue. After all, as the article notes, cleaning services like Merry Maids are a well-established thing. (As are personal references for housecleaners.) That doesn't make a potential new entrant bringing a better UX to the process a stupid idea. But it would seem to li…

> After all, as the article notes, cleaning services like Merry Maids are a well-established thing.

But so are the taxi companies and hotel chains.

Re: Why Homejoy Failed

#39

Post by gambiting »

jdmichal wrote: post #8
cm2187 wrote: post #5

The difference with Uber is that it requires a lot more trust to give someone access to your home while you're away to clean it. Not sure I would want to subscribe to a service where I would have to trust any local dude to visit my home. It's like a nanny. Picking someone to look after your kid is a very personal thing. It's not a lowest bidder thing.

Getting in a car is pretty much the most dangerous thing a person does in an average day. You may be trusting a cleaner with you possessions, but you're trusting that Uber driver with your life.

The driver has no incentive to be in a crash. The cleaner has all the incentive to steal your stuff.

Re: Why Homejoy Failed

#40

Post by jrochkind1 »

The lawsuit over independent contractors may not have been the deciding factor in their failure, but:

> For example, according to Zietsman, Homejoy city managers were tasked with buying up and distributing cleaning supplies

They chose and supplied the cleaning supplies to workers? And still thought they had _any_ chance of prevailing in a lawsuit where they claimed the workers were independent contractors and not employees? Um.

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