I love this story. This is also why I bristle when many in the Valley - PG included - keep disparaging non-technical people when they want to start a tech company.
I never understood this.
For a group of people (programmers) that presumably have been ostracized, shunned, and picked on in their formative years, why do so many in the valley do this to 'MBAs'.
It's ignorant at best.
The fact is, as has been shown time and time again, the #1 factor for success in a startup is not technical knowledge (or even business knowledge). It's just an unshakeable will to figure it out and get it done.
If you are a technical startup with non-technical founders, that's just 1 set of challenges you have to deal with. However, if you are a technical founder and are bad with finance and other business stuff (and are trying to raise money or do a partnership deal with another company) you will have a commensurate amount of problems.
I wish we all, on HN (at the very least), would stop painting with a broad brush and bashing large swathes of people.
Everybody here wants the same thing. To build a lasting business. Who cares what background they have.
Congrats to you guys for doing this - despite, what I am sure, were incessant snarky comments you got from geeks.
P.S. I apologize for the rant, but I am both a geek & an MBA - both of which I would never apologize for, and both of which have completely changed my life.
- "Idea people" telling them what to do and taking all the credit.
- A non-technical manager setting unreasonable deadlines.
- A non-technical manager trivializing a complex task.
- "Oh we'll just get him/her to write some code".
- Being treated as if their talents are a commodity.
- Being treated as if they cannot communicate like other humans.
- Putting in blood, sweat, and tears into a project for little or no pay.
- Studying like mad in college while everyone else seemed to be partying
(or this could just be me)
"This is also why I bristle when many in the Valley - PG included - keep disparaging non-technical people when they want to start a tech company."
I realize this is probably just semantics but I want to chime in on one little tidbit here. These guys didn't start a technology company in the sense that they needed technology innovation to succeed. They started an innovative cleaning business that uses some technology. They were building software in well trodden territory with a clear scope and execution path.
If you want to revolutionize web search, or be the first company to create an eCommerce store, or run a PaaS hosting business, then you probably have a tech company. If you're starting one of these, you damn well better have a nerd or two around. :)
This equally true for a bunch of YC companies, like AirBnB and Dropbox, where the technical challenge is in dealing with scaling, but the actual innovation is in the product.
I think the difference is legitimately more than semantics. There's a very real difference between starting something like Heroku and something like MyClean.
I'm not saying one is easier than the other. I'm just saying different expertise is required. MyClean sounds like a perfect company to be run by MBAs with technology pushed to the side. My gut feeling is the opposite for Heroku.
You're attacking a straw man here. We've funded lots of companies started by people who weren't programmers. In the YC FAQ, we recommend that such people find cofounders who are, if they can. But we don't insist even on that.
I never meant to attack you personally - it was more the sentiment that is often espoused in many comments & stories that appear on HN. You can even see some in this thread!
Some of that sentiment appear in your essays (and perhaps comments) - which people may take out of context.
Well...my point was simply that there is no silver bullet other than a dogged will to get it done.
There are many brilliant programmers who will never build a sustainable business because they just don't have the will to get it done.
Likewise, there are many MBAs that will be middle management in LargeCo. all their lives for the same reason.
It has become Valley lore that u need to be a geek to build a successful business - when it is patently clear that is false. None of the AirBnB guys are geeks - they are designers!
I think it has become the lore that you need to be a geek to build a successful software business.
There are always exceptions.
With regards to MBA's is there any evidence that getting one makes people more sucessful in their careers?
I know it helps if you already have a job to climb the ladder, but I don't think there is much in an MBA that isn't covered in a book like "The Personal MBA" and isn't much you will learn the hard way that isn't covered by starting your own company or joining a startup.
So...I guess I disagree with the premise. There is no single educational achievement that anyone can get that will single-handedly assure success in their career.
Have there been many success stories of people with MBAs? Yes. Have there been many success stories of people with law /medicine/accounting degrees? Yes. Do each of those guarantee success. Hells no.
Does an education guarantee success? No. The only thing that guarantees success is determination to be successful.
For me...my MBA taught me how the world works. It is surprising how few people understand how it truly works - yet they speak as if they know. For that single achievement alone, I would encourage everyone to get an MBA. That being said, does that mean that everyone that gets an MBA understands the world? No. I think it was more my finance/economics slant that did that.
Even still...does everybody with those slants achieve the results I did? Absolutely not.
So as I said.....it's not about the single data point that will make you a success - it's more than that. Survivor's bias (not sure if that is the correct term here) does lead people to link the two - i.e. the people that are more likely to be successful are the ones that are more likely to get a degree like that.
That being said...all people who get those degrees won't be "successful" and all successful people won't have those degrees.
The claims of the MBA education is extraordinary. They claim that this will give you an edge on everyone else. It's not just a normal business education.
That's the measurement here.
With regards to how the world truly works.
The world truly works in many different ways depending on who you are, where you live and what you do.
Did you learn how africans on the savannah live? How un-educated people in the Bronx live? How people without jobs get social security. Did you learn what a person who get cancer thinks or what someone who get their family killed feels?
What you learned was how the world looks like through the eyes of an MBA, but you have not learned anything about the real world any more than someone living on the streets learn about the real world.
If anything you are abstracted far far away from reality.
For me...my MBA taught me how the world works. It is surprising how few people understand how it truly works - yet they speak as if they know. For that single achievement alone, I would encourage everyone to get an MBA.
That sounds like quite a claim. Can you shed some lights on how the world works from an MBA's perspective?
Well...I can't speak from an "MBA's" perspective, because there isn't 1 MBA perspective.
In terms of the way the world works, I can say that politicians are not in the business of running the world the way it should be run - they are in the business of politicking.
It has become fanciful in the last decade or so, to blame bankers, wall street, the 1%, capitalism, etc. for all the worlds ills - but that's just not the case.
Politicians (many who I support also) are just as guilty.
Here is 1 truism that no politician of a heavily indebted country will say - bond markets are dead right.
If they demand a higher yield on a country's debt - it isn't because there are some "nefarious speculators" trying to make bank off of the demise of the poor people in that country. It's because the stupid policymakers and politician s have fleeced the country, the affairs are not in order and in order for them (bond market investors) to lend to your country in the crappy state it is in, they charge more than they will charge to lend to the US Treasury, Germany, etc.
Likewise, if the bond markets are showing very low yields to America despite all the rhetoric of America's economy in shambles and the debt-to-GDP ratio being too high at 90% - clearly something else is at work and the situation is not as bad as it seems. Financial markets are forward looking indicators - and by all indications, as a general rule, when it comes to properly (and easily) communicating what is TRULY happening with the state's finances, they tend to be spot on.
The issue is that politicians hate it because bond markets show up their lies and untruths. So they blame 'wreckless speculators' and tax bankers. When half of the time, the investors that are wrecking their bond yields are not even BANKERS!
But...it sounds good in a newsbyte because people like to believe conspiracy stories about the wealthy bankers that are enslaving the masses with interest on debt.
The fact is, debt, equity financing & capitalism in general have been the best mechanisms for growth, poverty reduction and standard of living increases over the past few centuries.
Most things you hear politicians blame things on, are just simply scapegoats that people accept because they know no better.
Markets do not predict the future, they only represent the current state of mind about the future.
The fact that U.S. bond rates are so low does not mean that "something else is at work and the situation is not as bad as it seems." It just means that right now, folks can't think of a better place to put their money than in U.S. bonds. That mindset could change quickly if market conditions change. It was not that long ago that mortgage-backed securities were highly rated and well-funded.
Note: I'm not predicting doom for the U.S. here--just making the point that financial instruments really need to be evaluated by their business fundamentals, not how popular they are with other investors.
Furthermore, while the U.S. bond market is resistance to manipulation due to its size, smaller bond markets are not so protected. Here's one example:
> Markets do not predict the future, they only represent the current state of mind about the future.
I never said markets predict the future.
I said they are a good forward looking indicator. Major difference ;)
> The fact that U.S. bond rates are so low does not mean that "something else is at work and the situation is not as bad as it seems." It just means that right now, folks can't think of a better place to put their money than in U.S. bonds.
Well....implicit in my example was that what people tend to do is to complain about America's debt-to-GDP and then suggest some other asset class that investors should be putting their money in - like gold or w/e. Given the large gold sell off a few days ago, I am sure many of those guys are pissed.
Either way, my point was simply that as a general rule, the sovereign bond markets are usually good, forward looking indicators about the health of the economy of a country (relative to others). That's all I was saying - which is contrary to what politicians tell the people. But because they don't know any better, they accept what they hear as gospel because it fits a narrative in their head - bankers are stealing the wealth of the world.
I agree with you on the relative long-term safety of U.S. debt instruments, especially compared to a volatile commodity like gold.
I still disagree that bond prices are good forward looking indicators about the health of a national economy. From January to September 2009, yields on Greek bonds actually fell almost a point--by your criteria, seeming to indicate strengthening future prospects for the Greek economy. Instead we all know what happened next.
> I still disagree that bond prices are good forward looking indicators about the health of a national economy. From January to September 2009, yields on Greek bonds actually fell almost a point--by your criteria, seeming to indicate strengthening future prospects for the Greek economy. Instead we all know what happened next.
I would definitely not say that low eurobond yields on Greek debt is related to strengthening prospects in Greece. But rather an expected likelihood that Germany and the ECB would bailout Greece at terms favorable to bondholders.
Do you have an MBA? I'm not trying to sound like a dick- that's an honest question.
I do have an MBA and while I definitely think it was overpriced, the relationships with top faculty, in-depth case studies, and lasting friendships that I got out of it is definitely beyond what you will get from a book.
That said, experience is and always will be the best teacher. There is only so much you can get from relationships, classrooms, and personal accounts described on blogs. At some point you have to find out for yourself by doing. Doing is the hardest part and it constitutes about 99% of success, which is why so few people ever succeed or even try.
I know people who are not at all "technical" or "businessy" who run wildly successful small businesses because they just did and didn't know any better. Of course there were other things they had going for them- they were personable, had large networks of friends, etc., but my point is that there isn't a formula for success, but you do have to get shit done.
No I don't have an MBA and I wouldn't want one even if it was given to me.
But I did start a design agency built it to 60 people and ran it successfully for 6 years working for client all around the world of all different kind of sizes.
I have more case studies than I care for.
I also build friendships and a great great network of connections.
That's all well and good but you sound a bit defensive. No need to be so touchy. I'm just wondering how you can speak to the value of something you've never experienced. Your opinion on this matter is about as useful as mine about building a design agency with a 60-person headcount.
You are absolutely right ThomPete, you need to either employ or contract someone technically sound to build a great software product. Mike Scharf is a great evaluator and hirer of people. This has helped our business tremendously.
This is such macho-induced cliche drivel that I feel like you're caricaturing one of these 'MBAs'.
First you try to belittle geeks for having been friendless, then call them ignorant. Then you break out the whole 'number one' nonsense, and even utilize a pound sign. And my favorite part is when you turn to the tautology of the 'unshakeable will to figure it out and get it done'.
Ha. Yeah, people who do can do X are the ones who can get X done. Hard to argue with that. And this group of 'MBAs', while they posses no uses that can actually be communicated or quantified, they have tons of je ne sais quoi to get it done with. And they'll fucking pwn the shit out of business with their endless supply of je ne sais quoi. And nerds? Ha, MBAs have more je ne sais quoi leaking out of them after slaying two 10s.
The point of dismissing these so-called 'MBAs' is not that a masters in business is some inherent flaw, but it's in calling that degree (or the concept of doing nothing, but 'being' awesome) an asset. It's in the type of person who does nothing, but wants to take from everyone else's pool of human capital and ride in their wake while pretending that the 'decisions' they make on the golf course while other employees are off actually working mean anything.
When you come here and completely fulfill all of the other presumptions what are we supposed to think? You think saying nerds were friendless, then spouting off meaningless one-liners about it is a way to entice people into moving beyond generalizations?
For a group of people (programmers) that presumably have been ostracized, shunned, and picked on in their formative years, why do so many in the valley do this to 'MBAs'.
It is hard to classify any group as being monolithic, but it has been my experience that an MBA really prepares you to be a good middle manager or consultant. Indeed, this is what MBA programs were originally designed to do and it still shows.
It also makes sense that middle managers would be the last people you'd want to hire at a startup (literally, middle managers are the last to get hired).
Of course, there are exceptions. A lot of exceptions in this case. If you have the startup bug, MBA or not, you'll start a company, but let's not pretend like this train of thought is completely unwarranted.
"This is also why I bristle when many in the Valley - PG included - keep disparaging non-technical people when they want to start a tech company."
"I wish we all, on HN (at the very least), would stop painting with a broad brush and bashing large swathes of people."
Pretty conflicting statements. Asking HN not to disparage people while disparaging people in Silicon valley himself.
If a non-technical founder wants to build a photo-sharing app, how would she/he even build a minimum viable product without learning how to code or getting a technical partner?
It depends on the business. Some ideas like MyClean don't need much technical skills to start.
It's pretty disappointing that this is the top comment on this thread.
I don't understand how a photo-shapring app would require more technical knowledge than MyClean.
The point is still valid though. People sit here acting as if moan-technical people can't understand what is fundamental a people problem (is there a market for this)?
A lot of startups might spend all the time in the world making the most elegant software in the world, but if nobody wants to use it it's game over.
Bad execution doesn't matter if the problem is important enough to them(think of all the people running around still doing things in buggy DOS software from 1996). But if I don't want to use your social network for cats, it's a lot harder to get people to care about your website than it is to hire motivated people to make your site better.
Craigslist is a great example of using (relatively) low-tech means to get things done. It used to be a mailing list. Shady download websites with 10000 popups and buggy captchas and timers also show that it's about the demand.
Of course if someone else is competing in the same domain as you, the best differentiator (after previous mind-share) is a good UX (lot easier to make with good software).
And if a technical guy wants to built a photo sharing app which also modifies the photos somehow without any idea of photography?
It's hard for a single person to built a successfull product or company, simply due to a lack of skills. That's why you need partner, co-founders, employees and contractors.
What makes a good founder IMHO is the ability to see what kind of skills are currently missing. The next trick is to get these skills somehow.
I think a lot of the disparagement comes mainly from interactions many of us have with a lot of these types of individuals.
A lot of the time the "MBAs" place an overemphasis on the ideas themselves being more important than the ability to execute on them from a technical perspective (although i'd have to say that a lot of developers may have the reverse disposition)
Because people make the mistake of constant blanket statements:
Technical people say: "MBAs always suck."
Non-Technicals say: "Techies are incessant and snarky geeks."
One blanket statement results in the retort of another statement, and then group polarization takes effect. So by making this rant, you're just setting a precedent for Techies to be flamed at MBAs even more.
Thank you for the supportive comments Marcamillion. Mike Scharf hired me to offset his technical inefficiencies. He in turn is the type of entrepreneur and business visionary who is great to work with.
"why I bristle when many in the Valley - PG included - keep disparaging non-technical people when they want to start a tech company."
PG's outlook (if you are correct) is based on his background perhaps - this from his wikipedia page:
"Graham has a Bachelor of Arts in philosophy from Cornell University.... He then attended Harvard University, earning Master of Science (1988) and Doctor of Philosophy (1990) degrees in Applied Sciences with a specialization in computer science.... He has also studied painting at the Rhode Island School of Design and the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence."
From this I can deduce that PG wasn't "business minded" in high school although maybe he did run some business on the side etc to make money (I don't know). But he wasn't interested enough in it to attend a business school as an undergraduate. If that had been the case instead of going to Cornell he might have chosen Wharton for undergraduate business. In Wharton UG (I graduated) most of the people - the majority of people that I met - knew that they wanted to be in business just like some people know growing up they want to be doctors. Only difference is those people can do something before college obviously nobody is going to practice medicine prior to training.
So I would suspect that PG's view of the world was based upon his ability to program and put together viaweb and without that programming skill (especially back then) viaweb probably wouldn't have happened. (Morris on the other hand, while a programmer, is a bit devious (worm) so that definitely is a quality that is helpful in business.
If I am wrong and I don't know what I'm talking about, then instead of saying "If you don't know what you're talking about, then why are you talking about it?" why don't you provide backup for your statement "you don't have any idea what Robert is like" which refutes the fact that I think someone who did what Morris did is "devious"?
I would make the same statement about Steve Jobs with regards to the blue boxes.
With respect to Morris, this statement (wikipedia) to me indicates he is "devious":
"According to its creator, the Morris worm was not written to cause damage, but to gauge the size of the Internet. However, the worm was released from MIT to disguise the fact that the worm originally came from Cornell."
This is a classic case of removing purchase friction. There is a market that wants to hire cleaners. There are cleaners who want to be hired. The traditional way of hiring a cleaner or finding a cleaning job requires a lot of effort on both parties. myclean.com goes ahead and reduces that friction with a website. They allow both parties to meet without issue. No wonder they are doing well.
Now, can you do this too? Yes. Yes, you can. Go and research markets where there is a lot of interest in a service or product, but there is a lot of friction is purchase. Remove that friction and allow people to interact easily. No need to do much else, but market it directly (which is rather simple). You can even launch this without writing any code. A simple Wordpress blog with a free theme and some manual labor. That's it.
The hard part of this business isn't "reducing the friction".
It's hiring people that you can trust, that show up for work, that you can get at a price and still make a profit.
Obviously many people run mom and pop 1 or 3 person cleaning services in local markets and that's been going on forever. What you typically do is get a suggestion from a friend, see an ad or respond to a flyer put in your mailbox or door.
"The traditional way of hiring a cleaner or finding a cleaning job requires a lot of effort on both parties."
Finding a cleaning job is actually pretty easy. If you are good you can get a job doing this getting hired by an established company. Or, as many have done simply put flyers in peoples doors in neighborhoods that you want to work in (or in office buildings for that matter).
In short this is not a web or technology play at all. It is simply running a business (and that part is fine obviously) the secret sauce of something like this is managing people and quality control. If you can handle that there are a multitude of business opportunities where you can make money. But that part is not easy at all to do. Plus if you are competing with larger companies that offer an upward path to employees starting at the lower level and have economies of scale.
Thanks for the post larrys. You make some excellent points and the companies you have pointed out are all excellent companies. The large national franchise model is slightly different form our tech oriented urban based model however. We plan to expand soon and want to continue to contribute positively to the economy through job creation and opportunities for growth and advancement for our employee's.
Your comment confused me a bit. Do they actually hire full-time cleaners, or do they just act as a middleman where cleaners, acting as independent contractors, can find cleaning jobs?
Hopefully they'll fix the blog thing when they roll out the new site. You're right though, linking to the main site is generally what someone naturally expects a logo to do.
You're welcome Medell. If your friends live in the NYC area we'd love to clean for them! Our rates are competitive with certain "off the books" cleaners and we are fully insured and bonded. We'd be happy to offer a $25 first time credit as well. Have them reach out to us at contact@myclean.com.
We're building a company in a similar, but different space (http://www.massagejoyspa.com : in home and office massage therapy), and I'd love to spend 15 minutes on the phone with you picking your brain - can you add a contact email on your HN account, or shoot me an email at lexsebro@stanford.edu?
Are you the person who runs this site? I think it could be streamlined a lot; there is just so much information on the front page. Who's really going to read all of that?
Also, I'm not seeing any FavIcon and the Lobster icon just doesn't resonate with me at all. Joy is a really powerful word, but it just gets lost in your typeface logo.
I do run the site, and you can email me at lexsebro@stanford.edu if there's anything else you want to add, or to continue the conversation privately.
Yip - I need to add a favicon, and I've been playing with the amount of content to figure out if shorter pages convert better than longer pages - the jury's still out on that one. Each content section is meant to answer a question that people asked themselves when looking at my site and talking out loud.
I always appreciate advice - thanks for taking a second to look things over and give me yours.
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Hello ovi256, we received some excellent press early on (Thrillist was huge for us), ran a Gilt campaign, and listed ourselves on free directories. We did not spend any money (outside of the money we lost with Gilt) in customer acquisition to begin with.
Hello JimWillTri, we have incurred a ton of technology costs in relaunching the site and wanted to make some strategic hires. We received a fair valuation for the raise and believe this capital will be enough to propel us to the next level.
Speaking of growth, how does everyone view their growth rate, which is 10% month over month? By the standards of a VC-backed company at their current revenues, it feels low. But I'm guessing this is considered quite high for bootstrapping?
I'm not convinced the web site drives the revenue. Alexa rank of 1 million. That means there's probably less than 30,000 visitors per month.
I bet the company does most of their marketing offline, and the site is more of a brochure. So it's a bit misleading to say that a $20k bootstrapped web site led to all the growth in this business.
Yes it will be a lot less than 30k unique visitors but don't take the 1 million+ alexa rank too seriously. In this case it probably just means that a lot of their traffic are non-technical users that don't use the Alexa plugin. Just installing the alexa plugin in their own browsers could get their alexa rank to 700,000. Just speculation from my experience.
How reliable can be a traffic ranking system based on some freakin' crapw^H^H^H^H^Htoolbar plugin? (I'm genuinely surprised, didn't know that is how Alexa work.)
So assume they only get 30K visitors/mo. At a 7% conversion rate (which is listed in the article), if you assume that each clean is on average $50.
That's a cool 30,000 * .07 * $50 = $105,000 in revenue from NEW customers every month. - i.e. $1.2M in new revenue per year.
If you also assume that what they have been doing in the article is true (i.e. working on keeping customers happy) then they likely have repeat business (given that people always want to keep their place clean), it's definitely possible that with a $1.2M revenue growth yet per year - based on current traffic trends - that they could be doing $4M/year.
Hello Marcamillion, without going into too many specifics about our numbers we actually get a lot less than 30k unique visitors per month. However, 80% of our business is from repeat customers and our customer retention numbers are very strong. This is the core of our business and how we plan to grow. We have done basically zero off-line marketing.
I wrote a quote simulator for my mom's cleaning business a while back.
You give it the room count, floor type, wc count, etc... and it produces an estimate of the size of the property and how much it would cost to hire the service.
To estimate room sizes I actually used my body as a ruler since I didn't have a measuring device at the time.
Fun project, too bad the economy in Portugal is so bad.
>>>>"choosing to focus on their strengths instead of role-playing Steve Jobs paid off."
This a thousand times.
Too many times I've heard founders bragging to me about how awesome their website looks while completely missing how crappy the user experience is which is driving away business. Good to hear these guys really focused on the core of the business and what made it great.
Thanks at-fates-hands, we're a service business and care about our clients. Mike preaches this quote: “There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else.” ~ Sam Walton
Were there difficulties, or things you had to learn business-wise, when switching to the model where you employ the cleaners yourselves? Can you talk about what was involved in that in terms of researching liability (e.g., is your company liable if there are injuries on the job or while traveling to the job?), taxes, paperwork, things like that?
Lots of challenges Bratsche. Most of the liability is handled by carrying very expensive insurance. The taxes are also expensive and there is a lot of paperwork involved with having so many employee's.
Maybe for the same reason that doctors don't give you shots or do the various other things that nurses do. There's a theory, I can't remember the name of it, that basically says the more you know how to do, the less proficient you can be at any one thing.
Good read. I recently became a father and suddenly the need for hiring baby sitters,nannies, house cleaners is critical and like the blog says "it is not rocket science but not as easy as ordering book on amazon", I totally concur. My wife and I have been struggling to find "good" and "reliable" cleaners, or babysitter even though we have tried craigslist, care.come (for nannies) etc.
Basic household needs have many pain points that are asking for innovation. Some of my pain points specially as a family with a kid :
- how to hire good/reliable house cleaners
- how to hire good/reliable nannies/baby-sitters (part/fulltime)
- I hate going to the groceries for items that are pretty much recurring. Eg.: milk,eggs,fruits etc. are mandatory and every time we run out, a trip to the store is needed.
In the same situation here. A couple of things that made a huge difference on the food and grocery front for us were:
- Ordering regular organic vegetable and meat boxes (we get a vegetable box once a week and meat once a fortnight). Find who does that in your area and give it a try. We use http://www.riverford.co.uk/ and I can't say enough good things about them.
- Online groceries. For the longest time, I thought people shopping for groceries online were weird. Now I understand. Give it a try - it will save you so much time and energy. The first shop is a bit of a pain but the subsequent ones are really quick as you can just go through what you bought previously and pick what you're running out of. In the UK, we tried ASDA (messed up every delivery - awful customer service), Tesco (can't remember why we don't use them anymore. Think they were neither really good nor really bad) and Ocado (absolutely wonderful in every respect. And, just as they say, not more expensive than ASDA or Tesco).
Wow... so first you choose "the family life", then proceed to outsource every last tiny aspect of (used-to-be) "normal" day-to-day ops? You guys must be very, very busy indeed!
I understand where you are coming from and I used to be in your shoes until recently. Lately, my time is a lot more valuable and even though I find time for HN :), every minute I spend must be chosen and spent wisely. So for things such as house cleaning (which could be a big deal if you have 3+ beds, 2+ baths and shit load of crap), I would rather outsource to a pro. Can I do it myself ? Hell yea. Would I be doing something else considering my time is critical ? Yep.
I can't help you with the rest of your pain points, but I do own a great house cleaning service. We cover the San Diego, LA and Orange County areas, and we'd love to see if we can take care of item #1: http://goldenshine.com.
There's a company here in Austin (can't remember the name) that will deliver fresh organic groceries to your door in a plastic box. They have a form and you just click the interval you want for the "recurring" stuff.
My only advice is to pay your nanny salary rather than hourly. You will get way more quality candidates. Also, try sitter city in addition to care.com.
Thx will do. For salary, it gets tricky because most of them price themselves hourly and we have to pay for transportation costs. Yes, I live in NY metropolitan area so the cost is steep.
There is a certain STIGMA against MBAs in the valley. Some of it well-found, some of it completely out of context and ridiculous.
I have an MBA, and my sense is that part of the blame has to be on MBA education itself.
MBA programs teach everything but the "Two skills absolutely necessary" as an entrepreneur: 1) ability sale (your idea, vision, team, product, etc.) and 2) ability to execute.
Luckily, I had one professor who focused on execution part of the experience by creating a class that simulated what happens when you start a company.
I remember what she always said: "If you give me a great idea, I'll give a $1 as thats all they are worth. Real value comes from executing it the right away."
A lot must depend on the average salary they pay cleaners. If it's around or under $20K/year, then probably doing quite well despite having 100 cleaners on payroll.
Clients who won't pay for retainers (with optional SLA attachments for emergencies, if required) shouldn't make public quips about their contract developers being at the movies. The market is such that I do not have to be available 24/7 for $100/hour, billable in 15-minute increments, no matter how much startup CEOs wish this wasn't the case.
> The market is such that I do not have to be available 24/7 for $100/hour, billable in 15-minute increments, no matter how much startup CEOs wish this wasn't the case.
Agreed.
Think that, in any market, for any talent, this would be a ridiculous arrangement for any manager/CEO to propose of a remote hire.
I think the author of this blog probably mentioned that anecdote as a comedic way to highlight the challenges of having product built remotely.
As someone part of a team who advocates for / tries to enable developers to work remotely (and employers to hire remotely), frankly, I'm happy to hear (and get excited by) stories of such arrangements working out for all parties!
For people interested in starting a similar business, there is a subreddit on this: http://www.reddit.com/r/EntrepreneurRideAlong/ where someone shows how he builds a service business from scratch.
Wow! Very inspiring story! I'm glad to hear you stuck to your strengths and didn't desperately force a non-programmer to learn programming. It was a critical part of your business but your full-time employees focusing on their expertise worked out for the best.
@mkbrody - Panel 3 'We clean' on the front page of your site - 'professionaly' should probably be 'professionally'. And before anyone steps in to be disparaging or #irony, lots of creative people have dyslexia and this is a typical error.
Congratulations. With that kind of success, I hope you treat your employees well. Most are probably poor women supporting their families. If I were ever to use a service like yours, the cleaners' wellbeing would be the deciding factor.
And this is probably why I will never be rich. The idea of hiring somebody to clean your house(or watch your kids, or do the grocery shopping) is completely foreign to me.
You've got it backwards. It's only after you have money that you'd start thinking about hiring someone to clean your house.
If you're saying you can't empathize with people who are different from you ... well that's a different issue. Most people are not like you so you'll either have to learn how to empathize with them, or create businesses/products that directly address needs you understand (and have determined many other folks also have).
Had a long talk about this recently with friends - people have different comfort levels with different "class" levels and what that says about us. It took me a long time to be comfortable with having a cleaner come by once every 2-3 weeks even though it made total sense both financially and relationship-wise (neither me or my fiancee are deep cleaners). Same sort of thing regarding hiring lawn people - even though they have better tools and can do it faster than I could. And a friend caught herself saying that she uses Amazon Fresh but that "she feels guilty about it". I think it's that we're all from strongly middle-class or working-class backgrounds.
On the plus side, there seems to be a dearth of ideas for the not rich that can be equally lucrative, so perhaps it's a leg up toward building the killer app that really helps a lot of people.
What are people's thoughts on applying this kind of "craigslist for services" business model to a number of verticals (not just cleaning or any other single market)?
There are a bunch of companies that do this (think Red Beacon, Angie's List, TaskRabbit, and a number of other verticalized marketplaces). I'm sure there's a vertical that still needs to be tackled though.
Yeah that's pretty close to what I was thinking. Or the Taskrabbit as mentioned by jonathanjaeger.
I noticed you are a technical co-founder at Thumbtack. I had an idea for a similar service that helps people with particular skills make themselves available for hire to their neighbours. Were there many business or technical challenges trying to reach so many localities across many different types of services?
Although I feel like we have been successful, there have been so many business and technical challenges that I'm quite sure that we would not try this one again if we had to go back knowing what we do now.
It's a two-sided marketplace, which means we had the chicken and egg problem and the network problem. To add on to it, we had to figure out how to build trust using a medium (Internet) that has been traditionally untrusted.
We had to figure out how to scale customer service for a business where we quickly found out that people expect good customer service. The Google model for support wasn't working.
Further, the field is littered with the corpses of, sometimes well-funded, ventures that have failed in the same space.
And finally, our initial marketing plan involved boots on the ground, kind of like a political campaign (all the founders met in DC on a political campaign). That one failed quickly.
The latest, hardest part is scaling the matching engine without using humans. Not sure I'm at liberty to say exactly how we solved that.
Thank you for that. I really appreciate the insight. I think in my mental "simulation" of this type of business I anticipated most of the issues you mention, but I'm sure there are tons of other details you've run into on a daily basis.
Playing around with Thumbtack it's really cool how the taxonomy is sort of intelligent and fluid so if you type in SEO you will get digital marketers or if you misspell "babysighting" you still get babysitters in your area. And then the quote request forms are customized for each and every service type. I'm sure this alone involved a TON of work and experimentation.
I'm not sure where you're located, but you may want to try Angie's List. I know they have a relationship with quality cleaning companies in many areas: http://www.angieslist.com/cleaning/. Thanks for reading!
I know in the article you say that outsourcing to third parties did not work out well for you. If you are willing to point other people to angieslist as an implied trusted source couldn't you use that as a way to vet your cleaners and expand to other cities rather quickly?
Hello bkmartin, our strategy so far has been to hire and train cleaners from the ground up. We provide training, steady work, and a path to numerous promotions. I'm not sure we add much value for cleaners who already have a business?
Exec and Homejoy are amazing companies and we have nothing but positive things to say about our competitors. However, I am fairly certain that they 1099 their employee's which means they use independent contractors. This is a different labor model and makes expansion a lot easier. It also has a lot of risks. All MyClean employee's are W-2 employee's and work for the company full-time. We will also be expanding soon!
If I'm guessing correctly (I searched the website but didn't find any definitive answer), they are not hiring cleaners themselves, but are instead outsourcing jobs to cleaners working for themselves.
It's a very common method to avoid all the pesky little taxes and legal liabilities that come with actually employing someone. It's also russian roulette for your company if the IRS decides your outsourcing partners are not actually real companies.
(I think the confusion is because of the term "ficticious self-employment"? I searched for a translation and that was the best I could find. I would welcome anyone to tell me what the actual colloquial term for this is)
Hello revelation, all of our employee's are W-2 employee's and work full-time for our company. We pay payroll tax for each employee and while the economics is not as beneficial as the contractor model, if we were ever audited we would be just fine. Thanks, Mike
I never understood this.
For a group of people (programmers) that presumably have been ostracized, shunned, and picked on in their formative years, why do so many in the valley do this to 'MBAs'.
It's ignorant at best.
The fact is, as has been shown time and time again, the #1 factor for success in a startup is not technical knowledge (or even business knowledge). It's just an unshakeable will to figure it out and get it done.
If you are a technical startup with non-technical founders, that's just 1 set of challenges you have to deal with. However, if you are a technical founder and are bad with finance and other business stuff (and are trying to raise money or do a partnership deal with another company) you will have a commensurate amount of problems.
I wish we all, on HN (at the very least), would stop painting with a broad brush and bashing large swathes of people.
Everybody here wants the same thing. To build a lasting business. Who cares what background they have.
Congrats to you guys for doing this - despite, what I am sure, were incessant snarky comments you got from geeks.
P.S. I apologize for the rant, but I am both a geek & an MBA - both of which I would never apologize for, and both of which have completely changed my life.