Homejoy

» see homejoy.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

the first time i heard about homejoy was the 2015 shutdown coverage on techcrunch. honestly. on-demand house cleaning was a san francisco yc-era category that did not reach turkey at meaningful scale, the apartment-cleaning market in ankara in 2015 ran through neighborhood referrals or temizlik şirketleri with their own employees, not through a platform with a contractor pool and a star rating.

adora cheung and her brother aaron cheung founded homejoy in 2010 in san francisco after running a small cleaning company called pathjoy out of college. the pathjoy model paid cleaners on payroll and lost money on every booking. the cheungs got into y combinator's winter 2010 batch with a pivot to a software platform that matched customers with independent-contractor cleaners at twenty-five to thirty-five dollars an hour in the us and thirteen pounds an hour in the uk.

in those days. seed money landed in early 2013 around one point seven million. the series a and series b together brought the total raise to about thirty-eight million dollars by the end of 2013, with google ventures leading the december round. by 2014 the service was operating in thirty plus us cities and in london and birmingham and a handful of canadian and french and german markets. that was the peak.

on 17 july 2015 the company announced through a re/code story that it would cease operations on 31 july. four worker-classification lawsuits were active at the time, each arguing the contractors were really employees and were owed back wages and benefits under us labor law. the company cited the lawsuits and the ic economics gap and the next funding round that had stopped coming. the doors closed two weeks later.

~ the case file ~

~ the climb ~

the early homejoy pitch in 2012 was uber for cleaning, a phrase that did real work in venture pitches until about 2016 and then became a warning label. the cheungs picked the cleaning category because it had a large addressable market and a fragmented supply side. the first ninety-nine-dollar cleaning promotion drove customer acquisition fast in san francisco, and the team rolled it out city by city through 2013.

the international expansion in 2014 ran on the same playbook and bled cash much faster. the london operation was carrying losses through the second half of the year. the toronto and berlin operations never reached a profitable book at all. by early 2015 the company had shut its operations in canada and france and was holding the rest together on bridge financing.

~ the lawsuits ~

this is mostly told from court filings. four putative class actions were filed against homejoy between 2013 and 2015, each arguing the contractor-classification was misclassification under california labor law and uk employment law. the suits never reached judgment. the company shut before the discovery phase concluded. but the same legal theory survived homejoy and became the spine of every gig-economy classification suit that followed, including the ones that later put adjacent peers under pressure in the cleaning and delivery categories.

~ what got buried with it ~

the homejoy shutdown was the first big on-demand-marketplace death of the post-uber funding cycle and the first to be read as a category warning by venture capital, by then. handy.com (later rebranded handy) was the surviving us cleaning marketplace and got acquired by angi homeservices in 2018. honestly. the homejoy app went dark on 31 july 2015 and the website became a static landing page. adora cheung went on to become a partner at y combinator. (or whatever it was called.) the brand never came back.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »