How We Bootstrapped a $20K Website into a $4M/year Business

I love this story. This is also why I bristle when many in the Valley - PG included - keep disparaging non-technical people when they want to start a tech company.<p>I never understood this.<p>For a group of people (programmers) that presumably have been ostracized, shunned, and picked on in their formative years, why do so many in the valley do this to 'MBAs'.<p>It's ignorant at best.<p>The fact is, as has been shown time and time again, the #1 factor for success in a startup is not technical knowledge (or even business knowledge). It's just an unshakeable will to figure it out and get it done.<p>If you are a technical startup with non-technical founders, that's just 1 set of challenges you have to deal with. However, if you are a technical founder and are bad with finance and other business stuff (and are trying to raise money or do a partnership deal with another company) you will have a commensurate amount of problems.<p>I wish we all, on HN (at the very least), would stop painting with a broad brush and bashing large swathes of people.<p>Everybody here wants the same thing. To build a lasting business. Who cares what background they have.<p>Congrats to you guys for doing this - despite, what I am sure, were incessant snarky comments you got from geeks.<p><i>P.S. I apologize for the rant, but I am both a geek &#38; an MBA - both of which I would never apologize for, and both of which have completely changed my life.</i>

This is a classic case of removing purchase friction. There is a market that wants to hire cleaners. There are cleaners who want to be hired. The traditional way of hiring a cleaner or finding a cleaning job requires a lot of effort on both parties. myclean.com goes ahead and reduces that friction with a website. They allow both parties to meet without issue. No wonder they are doing well.<p>Now, can you do this too? Yes. Yes, you can. Go and research markets where there is a lot of interest in a service or product, but there is a lot of friction is purchase. Remove that friction and allow people to interact easily. No need to do much else, but market it directly (which is rather simple). You can even launch this without writing any code. A simple Wordpress blog with a free theme and some manual labor. That's it.<p>Edit:<p>Why does your logo link to your blog!?

Would love to hear more about the first part of the trip: how they got to $15k per month. I'm sure I'm not the only one.

Posting turnover of $4M without discussing your costs means this article lacks credibility. It would have been better to state your actual profit.<p>Is it 4m/year revenue with 1m in profit, or is 50k in profit... makes a big difference.

I'm not convinced the web site drives the revenue. Alexa rank of 1 million. That means there's probably less than 30,000 visitors per month.<p>I bet the company does most of their marketing offline, and the site is more of a brochure. So it's a bit misleading to say that a $20k bootstrapped web site led to all the growth in this business.

yet another sinner of linking the main site logo back to the blog: <a href="http://blog.jazzychad.net/2012/05/28/startups-fix-your-blog-links.html" rel="nofollow">http://blog.jazzychad.net/2012/05/28/startups-fix-your-blog-...</a> - please fix!

I wrote a quote simulator for my mom's cleaning business a while back.<p>You give it the room count, floor type, wc count, etc... and it produces an estimate of the size of the property and how much it would cost to hire the service.<p>To estimate room sizes I actually used my body as a ruler since I didn't have a measuring device at the time.<p>Fun project, too bad the economy in Portugal is so bad.<p>If you understand Portuguese: <a href="http://abelhinha.net" rel="nofollow">http://abelhinha.net</a>

&#62;&#62;&#62;&#62;"choosing to focus on their strengths instead of role-playing Steve Jobs paid off."<p>This a thousand times.<p>Too many times I've heard founders bragging to me about how awesome their website looks while completely missing how crappy the user experience is which is driving away business. Good to hear these guys really focused on the core of the business and what made it great.

Were there difficulties, or things you had to learn business-wise, when switching to the model where you employ the cleaners yourselves? Can you talk about what was involved in that in terms of researching liability (e.g., is your company liable if there are injuries on the job or while traveling to the job?), taxes, paperwork, things like that?

Cached version of the blog's front page (has the whole article) <a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:BeeWgSXkr4AJ:www.myclean.com/blog/+&#38;cd=1&#38;hl=en&#38;ct=clnk&#38;gl=us" rel="nofollow">http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:BeeWgSX...</a>

Good read. I recently became a father and suddenly the need for hiring baby sitters,nannies, house cleaners is critical and like the blog says "it is not rocket science but not as easy as ordering book on amazon", I totally concur. My wife and I have been struggling to find "good" and "reliable" cleaners, or babysitter even though we have tried craigslist, care.come (for nannies) etc.<p>Basic household needs have many pain points that are asking for innovation. Some of my pain points specially as a family with a kid :<p>- how to hire good/reliable house cleaners<p>- how to hire good/reliable nannies/baby-sitters (part/fulltime)<p>- I hate going to the groceries for items that are pretty much recurring. Eg.: milk,eggs,fruits etc. are mandatory and every time we run out, a trip to the store is needed.<p>- Food and cooking. ??

There is no link from myclean.com/blog to the myclean.com home page. To read more about the company's services, I had to manually enter "myclean.com" in my address bar. Even the "© Copyright 2013 - MyClean.com" footer links the text "MyClean.com" to myclean.com/blog!

There is a certain STIGMA against MBAs in the valley. Some of it well-found, some of it completely out of context and ridiculous.<p>I have an MBA, and my sense is that part of the blame has to be on MBA education itself.<p>MBA programs teach everything but the "Two skills absolutely necessary" as an entrepreneur: 1) ability sale (your idea, vision, team, product, etc.) and 2) ability to execute.<p>Luckily, I had one professor who focused on execution part of the experience by creating a class that simulated what happens when you start a company.<p>I remember what she always said: "If you give me a great idea, I'll give a $1 as thats all they are worth. Real value comes from executing it the right away."<p>Just my $0.02.

Is 4 million breakeven? This is a business with lots of mouths to feed (3 founders and sweat equity engineer) and high variable costs...

Wow, fantastic. Cool story too. So, how often was your developer in Canada at the movies when you called? Haha

For people interested in starting a similar business, there is a subreddit on this: <a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/EntrepreneurRideAlong/" rel="nofollow">http://www.reddit.com/r/EntrepreneurRideAlong/</a> where someone shows how he builds a service business from scratch.

Wow! Very inspiring story! I'm glad to hear you stuck to your strengths and didn't desperately force a non-programmer to learn programming. It was a critical part of your business but your full-time employees focusing on their expertise worked out for the best.

@mkbrody - Panel 3 'We clean' on the front page of your site - 'professionaly' should probably be 'professionally'. And before anyone steps in to be disparaging or #irony, lots of creative people have dyslexia and this is a typical error.<p>Excellent story. Thanks, mkbrody.

Congratulations. With that kind of success, I hope you treat your employees well. Most are probably poor women supporting their families. If I were ever to use a service like yours, the cleaners' wellbeing would be the deciding factor.

And this is probably why I will never be rich. The idea of hiring somebody to clean your house(or watch your kids, or do the grocery shopping) is completely foreign to me.

What are people's thoughts on applying this kind of "craigslist for services" business model to a number of verticals (not just cleaning or any other single market)?

Wow. Looks like you guys did a great job. Very cool concept.

If they expand further into facility management the potential is even bigger.<p>There is a reason why ISS (not the space station) is a multi-billion dollar company.

The site isn't loading for me, but at least it's good to see that it's myclean.com and not the notorious mycleanpc.com.

I'm surprised to not see a reference to reddit's /r/EntrepreneurRideAlong -- was this inspired by /u/LocalCaseStudy?

Great :) My house is kind of dirty, have any advice on how to find a good cleaner outside of the NYC area?

Argh company blogs need an easy link back to your website!

Insert mandatory caveat here about fictitious self-employment.