Working in the cleaning job was informative; I learned how cleaning companies operate and identified inefficiencies in their booking and scheduling processes.

After a few weeks, I quit the cleaning job because I wasn't learning anything new, but it gave us confidence that we were on the right track with our platform.

I spent two weeks finding a job at a cleaning company in San Francisco, where I had to deal with long commutes and a taxing schedule, but it was essential for learning about the cleaning industry.

We faced a chicken-and-egg problem in our marketplace, needing customers before we could find cleaners, so we decided to become cleaners ourselves to fulfill the demand.

Cleaning is much harder than it seems; during our first job, we struggled with a large post-construction home, realizing that cleaning requires significant effort and skill. It took us five days to clean the house, which was a terrible experience for the customer because I had to return the next day and apologize for the lack of progress.

Over time, we learned that certain questions we asked were indicators of whether a cleaning professional would be a good or bad performer on the platform. This insight came from data collection and analyzing responses.

Manually doing processes yourself in the early stages of building a marketplace is crucial to understanding what needs to be built, rather than automating everything too soon. When we started onboarding cleaning professionals, we asked them numerous questions over the phone and in person, followed by a test clean. This process led to an acceptance rate of only three to five percent, meaning many candidates never made it onto the platform.

Every employee at Homejoy must clean a home in their first few weeks to understand the product and embody our core value of respect for all roles.

I want to share my journey of how my co-founder and I spent over three years searching for the right idea for Homejoy, which was born out of a personal need for a cleaning service.