
Miso (YC S16) offers high quality on-demand home cleaning in South Korea - stvnchn
http://www.themacro.com/articles/2016/06/miso/
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victorology
Hi, I am Victor, another co-founder at Miso. Just arrived at SFO to take part
in this summer's YC batch.

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asimuvPR
Would you mind speaking about your experience of joining YC and building a
business in SK?

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victorology
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.

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jstnjosepht
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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haksudol
Hi. I'm Haksu. co-founder of Miso. If you have anything to ask, I'm happy to
answer.

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Hydraulix989
I guess the big question for this concept is how do you avoid becoming another
HomeJoy? What advantages does the SK localization/market give you?

Interesting that YC is willing to bet on this concept again.

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victorology
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.

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finnh
How will you maintain high quality if you don't train your workers?

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haksudol
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.

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outside1234
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?

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Avshalom
They're uh, probably counting on it actually. Explicitly or not.

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callmeed
_> > Unlike the USA which has worker classification problems, South Korea’s
cleaning industry is primarily comprised of freelancers._

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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victorology
Depends on your definition of low. In Korea, the minimum wage is around $6
while we pay $10 and up to $13 for empty homes.

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chejazi
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?

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Hydraulix989
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.

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Naritai
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.

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jstnjosepht
What will the team be working on during YC? Adapting the model to the US?

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misomiso
Oh yeah! I've been waiting for over a year for this HN username to pay
dividends!

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hkmurakami
Next thing you know, your account will be hacked and taken away from you. ;)

[https://medium.com/@N/how-i-lost-my-50-000-twitter-
username-...](https://medium.com/@N/how-i-lost-my-50-000-twitter-
username-24eb09e026dd#.3rrbch1fx)

