I think a theme that I keep hearing re: HomeJoy (I was a customer in 3 cities over 3-4 years) is they weren't solving the right problem.<p>My problem as a customer wasn't finding a cleaner, but finding and retaining a cleaner I liked, was good, and I trusted. Their platform did none of the latter, and barely did the former.<p>I couldn't pick cleaners based on rating. I couldn't even see rating. It took forever until I could request the same person come every week. And, I knew in the back of my mind I was paying Homejoy a premium that the cleaner didn't see. For what? They were begging clients and cleaners to setup an outside relationship. Price goes down for the client, cleaner gets paid more. Win/win.<p>In my opinion what Homejoy should've done is paid for the connection - given my time preferences, match me with the best cleaner in my price range. Then I pay the cleaner directly. If Homejoy wants to setup stripe, collect just the 3% fee.<p>Charge the cleaner for access to the platform, or charge me for the matchmaking. Or both.<p>How do you get around the 1099 -> W2 issue? Have a series of training classes that the cleaners can optionally take, list this on their profile, allow them to level up.<p>Provide services to allow individual cleaners to differentiate them from the pack (having dealt with dozens or more individual cleaners, there were clearly some that were just doing it as an experiment and some that made this their career).<p>Yes, HomeJoy maybe wanted to treat cleaners like replaceable robots, but humans don't work that way. As the author stated, Homejoy was solving a human problem with engineering.
This epitomizes the arrogance and drowning self-absorbedness of Bay Area startups. And it does it in a Medium post.<p>And wow, there are some real gems in this post. For example:<p>"Customer interactions happen inside of their homes (anything that went wrong was grossly amplified)"<p>What did you expect? THIS IS WHAT YOU WERE SELLING.<p>"Client expectations vary wildly"<p>Yup, different people like different things. News at 11.<p>"High cleaner turn-over when product quality demands consistency"<p>What did you expect? Any warm body off the street can be trusted to go in some stranger's home?<p>"I could go on, but the point I am trying to make is that the Homejoy team was exceptionally talented and did amazing things given how punishing the industry was."<p>Oh I'm sorry. What you were trying to do was <i>hard</i>. That's because you were doing it wrong in the first place.<p>"To be fair legal constraints did throw a wrench into some of our plans."<p>For serious? <i>To be fair</i>? Fair to whom?<p>"Given what I’ve taken away from Homejoy I don’t look at it like a failure. I think there’s a morbid curiosity about what went wrong with a failed startup."<p>I don't give two shits about your failed startup. You failed for patently obvious reasons. <i>You trivialized the problem</i> which, for a company founded by so-called two engineers, is the ultimate sin of engineering.<p>"Homejoy will always be more synonymous with success than failure."<p>Delusions of grandeur.
Interestingly, even after it had failed Homejoy was one of the few startups YC specifically called out as on the home page as examples of what the program could provide. I've only just now seen it updated not to include that section.<p>What was it about Homejoy that got it so much attention, promotion from its investors and press from the media? What's the underrated startup that everyone has been overlooking during the same period?
Two years ago I was wondering why there was such a glut of these cleaning startups. The entire idea of applying the Uber model just didn't make sense - one is a commodity product with no way to bypass the middleman while the other requires letting someone into your home and encourages going off platform.<p>Dug up the old post for those interested - <a href="http://dangoldin.com/2013/12/09/why-are-there-so-many-cleaning-startups/" rel="nofollow">http://dangoldin.com/2013/12/09/why-are-there-so-many-cleani...</a>
> <i>Getting to that consistent Homejoy Cleaning proved to be way out of reach. As a result each product interaction could be wildly different, unlike the consistent factory packaged product vision that we were pushing. As a former colleague put it “Our product should’ve been positioned closer to finding the right match on OkCupid, as opposed to finding the right macbook”.</i><p>Interesting quote that IMHO nicely sums up the differences between something like Homejoy and something like Uber. Not everything can be neatly packaged in a one-size-fits-all service.
A couple things stood out to me about Homejoy:
-When seeing the founder Adora speak at YC female founders day, she talked about doing cleaning herself to learn how things worked, and something along the lines of it being embarrassing if she'd been "seen" by someone she knew. That underlined to me there wasn't really a respect for cleaners. It seemed strange to start a business where you think it's embarrassing to be one of your own staff.
-When I did order Homejoy, the cleaner was sooo bad/slow that I felt that they'd secretly sent me one of their engineers who'd never cleaned an apartment before. He just seemed lost. He spent an hour and 45 minutes just cleaning my bathroom which was really strange. When he left, I realized that he'd moved the plunger out of the bathroom and left it on the bedroom floor and I had to move it back! It was just weird, an experienced cleaner wouldn't move a plunger into a clean area and just leave it there! I wrote a long email to them about the experience and they offered to send someone back to finish up the clean - of course I'd finished cleaning myself by then and said I wasn't interested. I didn't feel they really took my feedback to heart - it was detailed an took a while to write, but they didn't respond to any part of it directly.
<i>> Homejoy was led by two software engineers. Both wildly talented humans, but both wildly out of place given the nature of the problem we were solving.</i><p>A tangent: This is something that scares me about many Bay area startups. What do software developers <i>really</i> care about home maintenance? This is a serious question. Some startups you can tell the founders are in love with the idea. The founders ARE the idea, and they're devoted to it. They believe it entirely independent of making money.<p>Home care seems like a nuisance and a real world problem. But why devote your life to it? Again, this is a serious question, not a stab at Homejoy. It doesn't seem like a problem that anyone could seriously put their life's work into. It's not like you're a home repair person crafting the finest cabinets you can for clients. From an outsider's perspective, this seems like the founders could only superficially be in it for the money. For the<p><i>> majestic startupville spell</i><p>, but not for for the true, deep love of the idea.<p>I've seen the Stanford engineer dropout start the clothing company. The bored engineer spin up yet another time tracking app that they don't use themselves. The car-less developer vagrant try to "disrupt" auto sales. I've been there before, brainstorming "startup" ideas. I'm glad none of them panned out, because I can't imagine being attached to any of them. Fringe ideas to make money and solve problems I didn't have.<p>I don't know what makes a company successful, but to me a red flag is a mismatch of founder lifestyle and true, obvious investment in the idea. Can a successful startup be founded by someone who's only in it for the money? Probably, and many Bay area startups are probably in that category. The money's here, after all.<p>Is it an unattainable ideal that the founders of a company truly believe in the product, entirely independent of financial success? Does that correlate with company success? I'd like to think so, even if just a fantasy. As an outsider, Homejoy doesn't appear to fall into that category, because I have a hard time believing two software engineers cared about the idea at their core, outside the obvious desire for something you build to succeed.
This (both the post and the comments here) are very interesting to me from a "some people are intrinsically optimistic and some people are intrinsically pessimistic" point of view.<p>> Homejoy and ‘fail’ have gotten tethered together in the tech headlines recently but for myself and many of my colleagues Homejoy will always be more synonymous with success than failure.<p>Rationalization is a hell of a drug And I don't mean that in a snarky way– synthesized happiness every bit as "real" as "genuine" happiness. The brain doesn't discriminate.<p>Dan Gilbert did a great TED talk [1] about this:<p>> "Who are these characters who are so damn happy? The first one is Jim Wright. Some of you are old enough to remember: he was the chairman of the House of Representatives and he resigned in disgrace when this young Republican named Newt Gingrich found out about a shady book deal he had done. He lost everything. The most powerful Democrat in the country lost everything. He lost his money, he lost his power. What does he have to say all these years later? "I am so much better off physically, financially, mentally and in almost every other way." What other way would there be to be better off? Vegetably? Minerally? Animally? He's pretty much covered them there."<p>Startups are often started by wildly optimistic people, while Internet messageboards tend to be populated by wildly pessimistic people. I'm not saying that either is better or worse, but it's an interesting phenomenon to witness.<p>So the interesting thing here is... while Homejoy is obviously a failure, I legitimately believe that OP feels good about himself, and probably better than some successful founders feel about their successful startups.<p>Rationalization is a hell of a drug. [2]<p>PS: Another lesson I think the cynics and pessimists could take away from this (but, by definition, probably won't) is that you can get away with a lot more failure in this world than you imagine, and still probably end up on top. OP is still probably better off than a lot of us career-ily and in many other ways.<p>I wonder, if blind optimism could be sold in a drink like coffee, would it be worth buying (in terms of net impact on well-being?) Seems like it might be. Curious for your thoughts.<p>---<p>[1] <a href="https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_gilbert_asks_why_are_we_happy" rel="nofollow">https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_gilbert_asks_why_are_we_happy</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/dont-delay/200912/downside-manufacturing-our-own-happiness" rel="nofollow">https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/dont-delay/200912/downs...</a>
600 days ago Exec pivoted and left the game.<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7380912" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7380912</a><p>Can we stop now?
> ...the point I am trying to make is that the Homejoy team was exceptionally talented and did amazing things...<p>> Homejoy was led by two software engineers. Both wildly talented humans...<p>> Homejoy and ‘fail’ have gotten tethered together in the tech headlines recently but for myself and many of my colleagues Homejoy will always be more synonymous with success than failure.<p>The entire post describes a litany of horrible business decisions and mistakes that are hard to reconcile with the author's compliments of the Homejoy team.