I had the same thought about making it a marketplace, which of course means you have to provide value to both the buyers and the sellers. Some ideas on how you might do that:
1) allow cleaners to set their own prices / times / availability at short notice
2) have users give reviews -> encourages quality
3) provide the bonding / insurance as an optional service to the contractor, not the customer, but make clear on the listings who is and is not bonded / insured.
4) only have reviews from current customers be easily available (or maybe bad reviews live for ever, good reviews only show if from current customers ??), so there is an incentive to stay on the platform, as it represents your marketing channel
5) take a fixed, smaller percentage
It seems like there is a problem in the market when you have an overwhelming supply of people willing to clean, but low actual demand due to high price:value ratio. You can interpret the difference in price between the cheapest 'craigslist' cleaner and the professional cleaning service as the 'price of ignorance' regarding the honesty and quality of the cleaner. It seems that Homejoy was trying to control quality, and then claim that price premium for themselves (as does every other professional cleaning company), while pretending that their cleaners were contractors, not employees.
I think they might have been more successful if they tried to build tools that actually reduced that price premium, by making it easier for people to judge the quality of cleaners, in turn making it easier for the better cleaners to charge more, and driving the bad cleaners out of the market. You would expect the average quality/price to go up due to competition and better information, which would raise volumes, and you would still end up making money, just a smaller percentage of a much bigger market.
I recall the story about how Ms Cheung spent some period of time working as a cleaner, to learn about the cleaning business. I suspect she learnt a lot about the mechanics of cleaning a house, but not necessarily what it is like actually trying to survive for several months only on the income generated as a self-employed cleaner: I wonder if Homejoy's relationship with its' cleaners and its' business model might have been different if she had?
It seems like there is a problem in the market when you have an overwhelming supply of people willing to clean, but low actual demand due to high price:value ratio. You can interpret the difference in price between the cheapest 'craigslist' cleaner and the professional cleaning service as the 'price of ignorance' regarding the honesty and quality of the cleaner. It seems that Homejoy was trying to control quality, and then claim that price premium for themselves (as does every other professional cleaning company), while pretending that their cleaners were contractors, not employees.
I think they might have been more successful if they tried to build tools that actually reduced that price premium, by making it easier for people to judge the quality of cleaners, in turn making it easier for the better cleaners to charge more, and driving the bad cleaners out of the market. You would expect the average quality/price to go up due to competition and better information, which would raise volumes, and you would still end up making money, just a smaller percentage of a much bigger market.
I recall the story about how Ms Cheung spent some period of time working as a cleaner, to learn about the cleaning business. I suspect she learnt a lot about the mechanics of cleaning a house, but not necessarily what it is like actually trying to survive for several months only on the income generated as a self-employed cleaner: I wonder if Homejoy's relationship with its' cleaners and its' business model might have been different if she had?