The snark us unwarranted here. The article explains that all employees went through a house cleaning during on boarding.
There are plenty of ceo/founders who would consider themselves not responsible for doing the dirty jobs that make a company work, particularly on a holiday such as thanksgiving (in the US, a very family-time centric holiday)
Again: the premise of the business is that there's a premium to collect on top of the work of housekeepers, who generally do that job because it is the only way they can scrape by, and that the premium should be assigned to people who can code. The article's author thinks that performing the gig once is somehow an illustration of a startup founder's determination. I winced.
Mild disagree here: the premium isn't coming from cleaners, it is coming from a hundred thousand or so local mom-and-pop operations which own one to five trucks. They hire substantially the same workers by demographics and do not appear to give their employees meaningfully superior compensation than the on-demand service companies.
The model appears to be centralize lead generation nationwide, pool support resources, and then price below market. In some cases that pricing is a result of VC subsidization of middle class customers. Longer term it would have to be through operational efficiency gains.
Sure, but that's tu quoque, isn't it? Meanwhile: none of those mom-and-pops are shooting for billion dollar valuations on the backs of people who by rights shouldn't be 1099s.
What makes this easier to stomach is the poetic justice of contractor "leakage" eventually killing the business.
I think that Homejoy was a thoroughly rent-seeking enterprise, rather than a disruptive technology startup.
Frankly, I failed to see (and still fail to see) what was disruptive about their process. They were essentially competing in a close to perfectly competitive market (with some minor level of differentiation).
Contrast that with Uber, who was able to capture most if not all of the Schumpeterian rent.
Economies of scale; national or worldwide brand recognition; improved efficiency of operations; leverage from applying top-tier marketing/etc talent to the problem.
Lead acquisition at a mom-and-pop agency is the 10% project of the owner or office manager or, at best, a local SEO/AdWords/etc agency. The platform companies, by comparison, can totally hire ten people with skills superior to mine to do it, as their only job.
Perhaps to some degree. I keep coming back though to the fact that national chains exist. They may not have an iPhone app or hot programmers but, for a regularly scheduled cleaning service, I'm not sure it matters and I'm not sure what problem more tech solves that cuts the costs significantly.
Mind you I'm also not sure that the national chains are a particularly great product for consumer cleaning. I used Merry Maids for a while and thought they were meh. That's an anecdote but the reviews aren't great in general.
Now I have a regular housecleaner who my neighbor recommended and she's great.
Nit, but many also do the job because it typically has relatively flexible hours and it allows them to manage their families as well as make some money. Or at least that's been my experience with our best housekeepers. Not just were they trying to collect a premium from these really hard working folks but the concept of "being late" is almost completely artificial for many of them (just so long as it gets done on the specified day.)
Anyways, who picks up their phone and fires up an app to demand that someone comes over and cleans up their house, right f-ing now!
I also suspect that the "on boarding" process of learning to clean probably didn't filter out the candidates that were really passionate about the business so much as it found the ones that would put up with just about anything. I don't know too many top tier developers that would do that. I do value the concept that everyone should understand the dirty work but this particular case might be outside the useful realm of that.
Just because lots of people are terrible doesn't mean this is laudable. One of the major roles of management is (or is supposed to be) to jump in and fill holes when needed.
In my opinion, a sane business starts out with the CEO/founders doing the actual work, and only after a great deal of expansion does it reach a point where upper management can think about being disconnected from it. I guess massive VC funding allows companies to skip straight to the second part.
There are plenty of ceo/founders who would consider themselves not responsible for doing the dirty jobs that make a company work, particularly on a holiday such as thanksgiving (in the US, a very family-time centric holiday)