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TL;DR: beyond cleaning -> https://www.amazon.com/services Ah thanks, it's been a while. I met some of the founders and thought the space was a capital-intensive, uphill battle without a biz model defensibility-component on its own. Also, I think the brand has to be crystal clear, and PathJoy / HomeJoy didn't do that. HomeJoy was again unclear as opposed to MerryMaids and the other million maid services. CleanJoy was nice, but I don't think they got the 0->1 solid first before pivoting the brand to something more general. Then, there's the threats of Amazon and Google are dropping in to offer all sorts of home services, WalMart and Costco will also want in, either acquiring established players per vertical or building their own. It's a double-ended marketplace of getting customers and providers... it takes big bucks/hustling to inform customers and loads of sales time convincing small/medium providers to prenegotiate fees, terms and conditions. (Small business people can be a PITA to sell to, but it's possible with obvious, immediate examples of bringing them more business.). And, how do you vet thousands of suppliers meaningfully and keep only the good ones (feedback, reviews, certifications, training, etc.)? Google, Amazon, AliBaba have the scale to do this where a startup would be hard-pressed to match the meatcloud scaling of human-involved business processes where automation isn't quite there yet, but it's getting better (and lots of startups should focus on automation of service industry and white-collar corporate processes). |
I had no idea about those big players wanting in. Very interesting. Thanks.
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