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 are going to eventually figure that out and cut you out of the equation.
Lead generation is IMO white-hot, maybe not for VCs but certainly to the stakeholders involved. Lots, and lots of legacy businesses yearning for new methods of leadgen, and lots of money involved for someone able to solve it.
The problem was precisely that Homejoy was a leadgen product but attempted to extract a cut of the action for the rest of time, rather than one-time as most leadgen goes.
saalweachter is right - the big question is what value Homejoy provides. In this case it's clear that Homejoy offers (to the cleaner and the customer) a substantial one time value, and then provides little to no value for subsequent engagements. Because the product doesn't offer any value into the future, both participants were incentivized (and IMO well justified) in cutting them out of the deal.
It's worse than that, IMO: Homejoy was effectively a leadgen middle-man. Homejoy was itself relying on other lead generators, namely Groupon. I think if they had been doing better lead generation themselves they might have had a better chance of getting more rounds of investment. When you aren't doing good lead generation and aren't providing good value to your customers/contractors, what is really left to invest in?
This doesn't change what you said; they may still have had a viable business if they had been structured for a one-time transaction.
There's going to be a huge difference between businesses where customer acquisition is needed regularly (eg, taxis; it makes sense to take a different taxi with a different driver, based on whichever is closest to you) and where customer acquisition is needed infrequently (eg, cleaners; it makes sense to use the same cleaner over and over, on a fixed schedule).
Cleaners, and some other industries, still need lead generation as they lose customers but also seek to expand their businesses. If they are spending time cleaning, they are not spending time marketing other than through the resulting word of mouth.
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 are going to eventually figure that out and cut you out of the equation.