Intriguing. As a thought experiment, if San Francisco organizes a farmers market for Tomato farmers and city residents but stipulates that prices must be fixed at $2 per tomato, is that no longer a market by the economic definition, now that price discovery has been taken away?
I believe high quality is key. We have been able to receive high reviews from our customers even though we offer little hands on training. In April, our average review was 4.6 out of 5. We are also rolling out an insurance product that is not widely offered in Korea at the moment.
We have review system to filter bad cleaners. When new cleaners onboarded, we thoroughly check their performance from our customers.
Also we assign high score cleaners to more customers. That review system keep our platform in high quality.
Basically review system is very effective one to maintain high quality.
Not only review system, we are adopting insurance plan for our customers and cleaners. That is also attractive point for high experienced freelancer cleaners.
We believe there are plenty of ways to keep our customers happy.
Uber has a review system, yet lots of stories about low quality drivers. They may be low in overall % of rides but get lots of new coverage overtime somebody has an axe to grind. I think you need to consider this more carefully.
This sounds like a recipe for basically asking the cleaners to underreport their hours to "go the extra mile" in exchange for high quality scores. How do you avoid this?
Expanding on the "avoiding becoming Homejoy" train, how do you prevent cleaners and clients from striking a deal outside of your marketplace once the client is happy with the cleaner and is presented with a discount by the cleaner?
Do you see the evolution of iRobot-esque autonomous cleaners as a threat to your business? Are you planning on pulling an uber with all the capital you raise and pursuing R&D of said devices?
I think it's still enough of a long-term threat (I'd say 5 years for these to start to become an issue, 10 years to become commonplace) to not get in the way of growing their business, and maybe eventually they will employee a few of those devices themselves.
If anything, in Uber's case, the other players have shown it can be a wise choice to form partnerships rather than to take on the risky and capital intensive process of building up an in-house R&D unit.
Even then, self-driving cards are a single-purpose task (yes, that task is complex, but it's single purpose). Cleaning is the amalgamation of a number of tasks. Furthermore, anyone who's had a cleaner knows that a big part of home cleaning is 'neatening', i.e. pickup up and straightening material to make them more aesthetically pleasing. Machines won't be easily doing that for some time.
Cleaning is very sophisticated and complicated work. We observed even small detail can change customers' satisfaction. Current robot technology is still very early to handle complex human work like cleaning.
In a longterm, robotic tech is opportunity rather than threats. Though we do not have specific plan to make autonomous cleaning system, we can take advantage from robot innovation.
As someone mentioned you are not a marketplace for independent customers. Beware the customer satisfaction is not the only metric that you should be looking at. Especially in South Korea. Do not contribute to the Choson hell please.
We don't have much experience with the program yet. We arrived in SF this morning and the first dinner ended about an hour ago.
There are some stressful aspects to building a business in SK and being in the Bay Area. 2/3 of our team will remain in Seoul while we are here. Relocating to a new area for 3 or 4 months poses its difficulties.
Despite that, we applied to YC for a reason and believe it will pay off. YC's network is great and the feedback so far has given us clarity as to what we should focus on. On a day to day basis, we plan on matching our hours with Seoul and will have Google Hangouts up to communicate better. We also brought office phones (VOIP) so we can continue to handle customer care as well as cleaner phone on boarding so we can continue to have a good grasp on what our customers want.
I will probably be able to offer more insights after a bit more experience in the program.
I was under the impression that one founder was allowed to remain "home" but the rest were required to relocate for the duration of YC. Is this not the case?
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 88.6 ms ] threadInteresting that YC is willing to bet on this concept again.
If anything, in Uber's case, the other players have shown it can be a wise choice to form partnerships rather than to take on the risky and capital intensive process of building up an in-house R&D unit.
Uber has raised 12.5 Billion dollars.
There are some stressful aspects to building a business in SK and being in the Bay Area. 2/3 of our team will remain in Seoul while we are here. Relocating to a new area for 3 or 4 months poses its difficulties.
Despite that, we applied to YC for a reason and believe it will pay off. YC's network is great and the feedback so far has given us clarity as to what we should focus on. On a day to day basis, we plan on matching our hours with Seoul and will have Google Hangouts up to communicate better. We also brought office phones (VOIP) so we can continue to handle customer care as well as cleaner phone on boarding so we can continue to have a good grasp on what our customers want.
I will probably be able to offer more insights after a bit more experience in the program.
That seems like the money statement there. Is this basically saying Miso can get away with paying cleaners the equivalent of a very low hourly wage?
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