Didn’t Homejoy Shut Down? • Hacker News Board

Re: Didn’t Homejoy Shut Down?

#311

Post by azima » Thu, Oct 29, 2015, 6:27 AM UTC

paulcole wrote: post #244

andy_ppp wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm actually tempted to write a response so harsh I'd probably be banned from hacker news. Instead I genuinely hope that YC will force companies taking the 7% into a no selling on data policy; I'm not saying that is easy to write but I am saying this situation without response smears YC, something I'm sure could be avoided in future.

Isn't the ability to collect and sell data a hedge against the huge percentage of companies that are for all practical purposes worthless? Kind of like a store selling its shelves as it goes out of business. May as well get money for anything that's not nailed down.

yup. and there are many well-funded startups that pivoted to buying/selling data from all the non-rocketships out there.

Re: Didn’t Homejoy Shut Down?

#312

Post by ivank » Thu, Oct 29, 2015, 6:38 AM UTC

JoblessWonder wrote: post #70

TaylorGood wrote: post #66

Digging into trademarks, incorporations and S-1's is a weird little obsession of mine.. That said, my initial findings are that Flymaids is directly related to Homejoy. Under Privacy link of Flymaids it states "In the European Union, we are Fly Maids Europe Limited, a company incorporated in England and Wales (registration number 8883585) with its registered office address at 14 Whittonditch Road, Ramsbury, Marlborou…

As I mentioned in another post, they don't seem to be actually registered in Deleware and there are typos related to find/replace (support@flymaids.com.com) so I'm not sure we can discount the chance someone just cut/pasted that from the original Homejoy privacy page. Homejoy's privacy page doesn't load and the wayback machine was blocked via robots.txt so we have no good way of checking that I can think of. Also, ni…

In case anyone really wants to go digging, homejoy was archived and the WARCs are available in these collections (ctrl-f homejoy):

https://archive.org/download/archiveteam_archivebot_go_20150...

Re: Didn’t Homejoy Shut Down?

#313

Post by manigandham » Thu, Oct 29, 2015, 6:40 AM UTC

SomeCallMeTim wrote: post #248

bigtones wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And when I say "testing different approaches" I mean: * completely ripping off competitor business websites * throwing PCI compliance and SSL encryption out the window * generally treating our VC money purchased customers from our old firm like commodity dirt. This one is gonna be a winner for sure.

>throwing PCI compliance and SSL encryption out the window If they were using Stripe or similar, then they don't have access to your credit cards. Only the last four digits and expiration.

Yet without HTTPS anyone changing or entering new credit card info is at risk on this site. There's also personal information like where to find spare keys and stuff; it should be a lot more secure than this.

Re: Didn’t Homejoy Shut Down?

#314

Post by FlyingSnake » Thu, Oct 29, 2015, 7:30 AM UTC

w1ntermute wrote: post #264

llamataboot wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why did you copy Handy's site verbatim? Why did you not give customers the option to opt-in to your new venture? Why did you post the logos of news organizations that had never written you up?

They're doing things that don't scale (aka hacking/hustling).

...and hoping they cover their tracks after they get traction.

Re: Didn’t Homejoy Shut Down?

#315

Post by sink » Thu, Oct 29, 2015, 7:44 AM UTC

aarontcheung wrote: post #300

aarontcheung wrote: post #125

I'm one of the founders of Homejoy. I'm still very passionate about the home service space. After leaving Homejoy, I started FlyMaids, where we're exploring a few different angles on the space. We recently acquired the customer and service provider data from Homejoy. We're a small team that has been focused on moving quickly while bootstraping. We tried to quickly test different approaches, but we realize now that we…

I wanted to follow up and address some concerns mentioned in this thread, and acknowledge that I definitely made mistakes. How did you get my information? We acquired Homejoy’s domain and customer information through an ABC process. Our intention is to improve and then relaunch Homejoy’s cleaning service. We were testing a new model using Fly Maids, one of our testing brands. As evidenced today, we made some mistakes…

Why is a Google form required to ensure that my information is never used in any way?

Aaron Cheung, I would appreciate it if you didn't taint YC's brand with your questionable business practices.

Re: Didn’t Homejoy Shut Down?

#316

Post by sulam » Thu, Oct 29, 2015, 8:01 AM UTC

brownbat wrote: post #273

lemevi wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We recently acquired the customer and service provider data from Homejoy. That's all you really need to know about FlyMaids and Homejoy. If I ran a startup into the ground I would never ever betray my customers by selling their data!

> If I ran a startup into the ground I would never ever betray my customers by selling their data! When you run a business into the ground, some decisions about what you sell get taken over by courts, at the direction of your creditors. When you trust your data with a company, you're not just trusting its ethics, you're trusting its long term viability too.

You're trusting that they or their acquirers will honor the contracts that they have with you. In the case of Homejoy, my assumption is that the claims/promises they made constitute a contract with their users that limits their ability to make use of your data outside the described scope. IANAL, but I think there's a reason we don't regularly hear about things like this - it's actually hard to do without getting sued.

Re: Didn’t Homejoy Shut Down?

#317

Post by gondo » Thu, Oct 29, 2015, 8:01 AM UTC

synunlimited wrote: post #282

gondo wrote: post #48

as someone mentioned in the blog comment, Fly Maids site is a complete copy (with redesigned homepage) of another cleaning service http://www.homeaglow.com/ @johnsalzarulo out of curiosity, try if your login works on homeaglow.com f.e.: both logos are served from the same S3 bucket: https://s3q1w2e3.s3.amazonaws.com/brands/logos/fly_maids.png https://s3q1w2e3.s3.amazonaws.com/brands/logos/homeaglow.png

Interesting that now when you to go to http://www.homeaglow.com/ you get a Heroku app not found error message.

yes, same for http://www.flymaids.com/ looks like they disabled both now

Re: Didn’t Homejoy Shut Down?

#318

Post by shkkmo » Thu, Oct 29, 2015, 8:10 AM UTC

jessedhillon wrote: post #310

nerdy wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except this article says it is not served over SSL. There's even a huge graphic with an arrow pointing it out. https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/1*dLlQGvWTeMTB7PT_n...

That could just be the last four digits. When you create a token with Stripe, you do still get those back. Conceivably, they're showing 12 asterisks and the naked last four, while retaining the token Homejoy used with you so they can recharge -- although in order to do that, they would need Homejoy's Stripe API secret.

The last four digits are still plenty sensitive enough to make serving them over http blatantly irresponsible.

Re: Didn’t Homejoy Shut Down?

#319

Post by jmathai » Thu, Oct 29, 2015, 8:20 AM UTC

ceejayoz wrote: post #225

jmathai wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't look like it is stored (only) with Stripe. The profile section of the site (per the blog post screenshot) displays some of the credit card info.

Stripe's API returns the last four digits for a tokenized card so you can display them to users.

Thanks for clarifying that. Did not know.

Re: Didn’t Homejoy Shut Down?

#320

Post by jarek » Thu, Oct 29, 2015, 8:51 AM UTC

ghayes wrote: post #278

Honest question, how is this #11 right now with 901 points? It's below a story with 199 points that was posted an hour before.

It must have been heavily flagged. It's been lower than it should have been from the start. Admittedly the title of the submission isn't great so - if I'm being charitable - it's because users flagged based on title only.