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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.