We realized we needed to learn how to clean properly before bringing professional cleaners onto our platform, so I decided to get a job at a cleaning company to gain firsthand experience.

To attract customers, we initially set up a website but received no bookings. We then resorted to giving away free water bottles at a fair to engage potential customers and successfully booked cleanings.

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.

In our early days, we operated a cold-calling strategy, reaching out to landlords directly to understand their needs and offer our services.

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.

We realized that we had to be at the customer's doorstep to improve retention, so we started doing initial deliveries ourselves to understand the customer experience better.

We secured our first customer by doing door-to-door outreach, waiting for the food truck owner to show up.

To truly solve the grocery delivery problem for customers, we needed to own the entire process from backend to delivery.

After exploring various ideas, we realized that booking a cleaning service was inconvenient and the industry hadn't changed in over 60 years, leading us to create Homejoy.