Ask HN: Free / reduced price housekeeping (subsidized by in-home advertising)

[douglascludlow]

My company, The Happy Home Company, is testing out a few new services. One of these is a free housekeeping service, subsidized by advertising.

It would work by the house cleaners leaving products / samples / offers in your home for you to sample / try out.

Depending on your cleaning needs, your cleaning would be either entirely, or partially subsidized.

What do you think? Is this too invasive? Or does it make an expensive service (house cleaning) more affordable through a fair trade-off.

Any and all thoughts would be appreciated.

[Throwaway90283]

Is it free housekeeping, or cheaper cleaning? You're claiming both, so what's the business plan and how much are people saving?

Secondly, people always take free samples, so what's the benefit of cleaning their home? Why can't you walk down the street and hand out advertisements and free toothpaste or lotion samples? You can easily give out hundreds in an afternoon, and it doesn't cost a thing. So, why clean a house for free, or give them $10 or $20 off the cleaning, just to drop off a couple of samples in one household?

[douglascludlow]

Good question. You can obviously just hand out stuff door to door - however, the vast majority of those samples get thrown away.

Here, you can put a shampoo sample directly in their shower, or a yogurt same in their refrigerator. Advertisers will pay far more for that, allowing us to subsidize home services.

[brudgers]

Free house cleaning in exchange for being an in-home product tester might be an interesting proposition. Reduced price for accepting rather than using free samples has a fairly obvious base case under models of economic rationality.

[cweagans]

As long as you're not leaving banner ads on my walls, I'm happy. I'd try it.

[douglascludlow]

Great - send me an email at [e-mail], and I'll set you up.