
How We Bootstrapped a $20K Website into a $4M/year Business   - mkbrody
http://www.myclean.com/blog/?p=452
======
marcamillion
I love this story. This is also why I bristle when many in the Valley - PG
included - keep disparaging non-technical people when they want to start a
tech company.

I never understood this.

For a group of people (programmers) that presumably have been ostracized,
shunned, and picked on in their formative years, why do so many in the valley
do this to 'MBAs'.

It's ignorant at best.

The fact is, as has been shown time and time again, the #1 factor for success
in a startup is not technical knowledge (or even business knowledge). It's
just an unshakeable will to figure it out and get it done.

If you are a technical startup with non-technical founders, that's just 1 set
of challenges you have to deal with. However, if you are a technical founder
and are bad with finance and other business stuff (and are trying to raise
money or do a partnership deal with another company) you will have a
commensurate amount of problems.

I wish we all, on HN (at the very least), would stop painting with a broad
brush and bashing large swathes of people.

Everybody here wants the same thing. To build a lasting business. Who cares
what background they have.

Congrats to you guys for doing this - despite, what I am sure, were incessant
snarky comments you got from geeks.

 _P.S. I apologize for the rant, but I am both a geek & an MBA - both of which
I would never apologize for, and both of which have completely changed my
life._

~~~
physcab
> why do so many in the valley do this to 'MBAs'.

Because every technical person has a story about:

    
    
      - "Idea people" telling them what to do and taking all the credit.
      - A non-technical manager setting unreasonable deadlines.
      - A non-technical manager trivializing a complex task. 
      - "Oh we'll just get him/her to write some code".
      - Being treated as if their talents are a commodity.
      - Being treated as if they cannot communicate like other humans.
      - Putting in blood, sweat, and tears into a project for little or no pay.
      - Studying like mad in college while everyone else seemed to be partying 
        (or this could just be me)

~~~
marcamillion
I think the correct term for those people are "douchebags"...not "MBAs".

~~~
jaggederest
A = douchebags

B = MBAs

B ⊆ A

~~~
mahmud
Quite the startling fallacy there, even if disguised in symbols.

------
orangethirty
This is a classic case of removing purchase friction. There is a market that
wants to hire cleaners. There are cleaners who want to be hired. The
traditional way of hiring a cleaner or finding a cleaning job requires a lot
of effort on both parties. myclean.com goes ahead and reduces that friction
with a website. They allow both parties to meet without issue. No wonder they
are doing well.

Now, can you do this too? Yes. Yes, you can. Go and research markets where
there is a lot of interest in a service or product, but there is a lot of
friction is purchase. Remove that friction and allow people to interact
easily. No need to do much else, but market it directly (which is rather
simple). You can even launch this without writing any code. A simple Wordpress
blog with a free theme and some manual labor. That's it.

Edit:

Why does your logo link to your blog!?

~~~
nilkn
Your comment confused me a bit. Do they actually hire full-time cleaners, or
do they just act as a middleman where cleaners, acting as independent
contractors, can find cleaning jobs?

~~~
MattGrommes
He says they started out with contractors and moved to in-house people because
of a lack of quality.

~~~
mkbrody
You're right MattGrommes, thanks for the post.

------
ovi256
Would love to hear more about the first part of the trip: how they got to $15k
per month. I'm sure I'm not the only one.

~~~
mkbrody
Hello ovi256, we received some excellent press early on (Thrillist was huge
for us), ran a Gilt campaign, and listed ourselves on free directories. We did
not spend any money (outside of the money we lost with Gilt) in customer
acquisition to begin with.

~~~
Aco-
the money you "lost" with gilt? did the promotion not pay for itself in volume
and repeat customers?

~~~
mkbrody
Hello Aco, we have an excellent relationship with Gilt and value them as a
partner. I just meant it was an out-of-pocket expense initially.

------
n9com
Posting turnover of $4M without discussing your costs means this article lacks
credibility. It would have been better to state your actual profit.

Is it 4m/year revenue with 1m in profit, or is 50k in profit... makes a big
difference.

~~~
marcamillion
Given the stage of growth they are in - early stage of likely hyper growth -
their profit doesn't make much of a difference right now.

They are likely reinvesting everything into the business, thereby leaving them
with little to no profit.

~~~
usaar333
Speaking of growth, how does everyone view their growth rate, which is 10%
month over month? By the standards of a VC-backed company at their current
revenues, it feels low. But I'm guessing this is considered quite high for
bootstrapping?

------
sixQuarks
I'm not convinced the web site drives the revenue. Alexa rank of 1 million.
That means there's probably less than 30,000 visitors per month.

I bet the company does most of their marketing offline, and the site is more
of a brochure. So it's a bit misleading to say that a $20k bootstrapped web
site led to all the growth in this business.

~~~
clark-kent
Yes it will be a lot less than 30k unique visitors but don't take the 1
million+ alexa rank too seriously. In this case it probably just means that a
lot of their traffic are non-technical users that don't use the Alexa plugin.
Just installing the alexa plugin in their own browsers could get their alexa
rank to 700,000. Just speculation from my experience.

~~~
Yaggo
How reliable can be a traffic ranking system based on some freakin'
crapw^H^H^H^H^Htoolbar plugin? (I'm genuinely surprised, didn't know that is
how Alexa work.)

------
jazzychad
yet another sinner of linking the main site logo back to the blog:
[http://blog.jazzychad.net/2012/05/28/startups-fix-your-
blog-...](http://blog.jazzychad.net/2012/05/28/startups-fix-your-blog-
links.html) \- please fix!

~~~
brador
It looks like a wordpress blog and so is non trivial to link to the main site.

I have no idea why Wordpress made it so difficult to relink, but it's not easy
to do.

~~~
LordIllidan
It's just a matter of editing the theme files.

------
yeureka
I wrote a quote simulator for my mom's cleaning business a while back.

You give it the room count, floor type, wc count, etc... and it produces an
estimate of the size of the property and how much it would cost to hire the
service.

To estimate room sizes I actually used my body as a ruler since I didn't have
a measuring device at the time.

Fun project, too bad the economy in Portugal is so bad.

If you understand Portuguese: <http://abelhinha.net>

------
at-fates-hands
>>>>"choosing to focus on their strengths instead of role-playing Steve Jobs
paid off."

This a thousand times.

Too many times I've heard founders bragging to me about how awesome their
website looks while completely missing how crappy the user experience is which
is driving away business. Good to hear these guys really focused on the core
of the business and what made it great.

~~~
mkbrody
Thanks at-fates-hands, we're a service business and care about our clients.
Mike preaches this quote: “There is only one boss. The customer. And he can
fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending
his money somewhere else.” ~ Sam Walton

------
bratsche
Were there difficulties, or things you had to learn business-wise, when
switching to the model where you employ the cleaners yourselves? Can you talk
about what was involved in that in terms of researching liability (e.g., is
your company liable if there are injuries on the job or while traveling to the
job?), taxes, paperwork, things like that?

~~~
mkbrody
Lots of challenges Bratsche. Most of the liability is handled by carrying very
expensive insurance. The taxes are also expensive and there is a lot of
paperwork involved with having so many employee's.

------
patmcguire
Cached version of the blog's front page (has the whole article)
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:BeeWgSX...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:BeeWgSXkr4AJ:www.myclean.com/blog/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

~~~
mkbrody
Thank you. Our Canadian developer is working on fixing now!

~~~
t0
Why not go ahead and learn basic HTML? You brag about it like you're proud of
knowing nothing.

You could literally be proficient in HTML and basic server management this
afternoon if you tried.

I'm not saying you should or taking a cheap shot, I just can't understand
_why_ some refuse to learn when their jobs depend on it.

~~~
SurfScore
Maybe for the same reason that doctors don't give you shots or do the various
other things that nurses do. There's a theory, I can't remember the name of
it, that basically says the more you know how to do, the less proficient you
can be at any one thing.

Dunno if this is why, but just a thought

------
codegeek
Good read. I recently became a father and suddenly the need for hiring baby
sitters,nannies, house cleaners is critical and like the blog says "it is not
rocket science but not as easy as ordering book on amazon", I totally concur.
My wife and I have been struggling to find "good" and "reliable" cleaners, or
babysitter even though we have tried craigslist, care.come (for nannies) etc.

Basic household needs have many pain points that are asking for innovation.
Some of my pain points specially as a family with a kid :

\- how to hire good/reliable house cleaners

\- how to hire good/reliable nannies/baby-sitters (part/fulltime)

\- I hate going to the groceries for items that are pretty much recurring.
Eg.: milk,eggs,fruits etc. are mandatory and every time we run out, a trip to
the store is needed.

\- Food and cooking. ??

~~~
dualogy
Wow... so first you choose "the family life", then proceed to outsource every
last tiny aspect of (used-to-be) "normal" day-to-day ops? You guys must be
very, very busy indeed!

~~~
tmorton
That's progress. Normal day-to-day ops used to include sewing clothes,
churning butter, and building furniture.

------
cpeterso
There is no link from myclean.com/blog to the myclean.com home page. To read
more about the company's services, I had to manually enter "myclean.com" in my
address bar. Even the "© Copyright 2013 - MyClean.com" footer links the text
"MyClean.com" to myclean.com/blog!

~~~
mkbrody
<https://www.myclean.com/> Thanks!

------
mehuln
There is a certain STIGMA against MBAs in the valley. Some of it well-found,
some of it completely out of context and ridiculous.

I have an MBA, and my sense is that part of the blame has to be on MBA
education itself.

MBA programs teach everything but the "Two skills absolutely necessary" as an
entrepreneur: 1) ability sale (your idea, vision, team, product, etc.) and 2)
ability to execute.

Luckily, I had one professor who focused on execution part of the experience
by creating a class that simulated what happens when you start a company.

I remember what she always said: "If you give me a great idea, I'll give a $1
as thats all they are worth. Real value comes from executing it the right
away."

Just my $0.02.

------
dia80
Is 4 million breakeven? This is a business with lots of mouths to feed (3
founders and sweat equity engineer) and high variable costs...

~~~
mkbrody
The founders make a nice living and we continually reinvest into the business.

------
tejay
Wow, fantastic. Cool story too. So, how often was your developer in Canada at
the movies when you called? Haha

~~~
nthj
Clients who won't pay for retainers (with optional SLA attachments for
emergencies, if required) shouldn't make public quips about their contract
developers being at the movies. The market is such that I do not have to be
available 24/7 for $100/hour, billable in 15-minute increments, no matter how
much startup CEOs wish this wasn't the case.

~~~
tejay
> The market is such that I do not have to be available 24/7 for $100/hour,
> billable in 15-minute increments, no matter how much startup CEOs wish this
> wasn't the case.

Agreed.

Think that, in any market, for any talent, this would be a ridiculous
arrangement for any manager/CEO to propose of a remote hire.

I think the author of this blog probably mentioned that anecdote as a comedic
way to highlight the challenges of having product built remotely.

As someone part of a team who advocates for / tries to enable developers to
work remotely (and employers to hire remotely), frankly, I'm happy to hear
(and get excited by) stories of such arrangements working out for all parties!

------
aymeric
For people interested in starting a similar business, there is a subreddit on
this: <http://www.reddit.com/r/EntrepreneurRideAlong/> where someone shows how
he builds a service business from scratch.

~~~
andy_boot
I followed that story for a while - it was really interesting. Its a shame
that they splinted off to a private forum.

------
danielfriedman
Wow! Very inspiring story! I'm glad to hear you stuck to your strengths and
didn't desperately force a non-programmer to learn programming. It was a
critical part of your business but your full-time employees focusing on their
expertise worked out for the best.

------
Jefff8
@mkbrody - Panel 3 'We clean' on the front page of your site - 'professionaly'
should probably be 'professionally'. And before anyone steps in to be
disparaging or #irony, lots of creative people have dyslexia and this is a
typical error.

Excellent story. Thanks, mkbrody.

------
peripetylabs
Congratulations. With that kind of success, I hope you treat your employees
well. Most are probably poor women supporting their families. If I were ever
to use a service like yours, the cleaners' wellbeing would be the deciding
factor.

------
thejteam
And this is probably why I will never be rich. The idea of hiring somebody to
clean your house(or watch your kids, or do the grocery shopping) is completely
foreign to me.

~~~
jasonshen
You've got it backwards. It's only after you have money that you'd start
thinking about hiring someone to clean your house.

If you're saying you can't empathize with people who are different from you
... well that's a different issue. Most people are not like you so you'll
either have to learn how to empathize with them, or create businesses/products
that directly address needs you understand (and have determined many other
folks also have).

~~~
tunesmith
Had a long talk about this recently with friends - people have different
comfort levels with different "class" levels and what that says about us. It
took me a long time to be comfortable with having a cleaner come by once every
2-3 weeks even though it made total sense both financially and relationship-
wise (neither me or my fiancee are deep cleaners). Same sort of thing
regarding hiring lawn people - even though they have better tools and can do
it faster than I could. And a friend caught herself saying that she uses
Amazon Fresh but that "she feels guilty about it". I think it's that we're all
from strongly middle-class or working-class backgrounds.

------
mladenkovacevic
What are people's thoughts on applying this kind of "craigslist for services"
business model to a number of verticals (not just cleaning or any other single
market)?

~~~
jeremyt
Like <http://thumbtack.com>?

~~~
mladenkovacevic
Yeah that's pretty close to what I was thinking. Or the Taskrabbit as
mentioned by jonathanjaeger.

I noticed you are a technical co-founder at Thumbtack. I had an idea for a
similar service that helps people with particular skills make themselves
available for hire to their neighbours. Were there many business or technical
challenges trying to reach so many localities across many different types of
services?

~~~
jeremyt
Although I feel like we have been successful, there have been so many business
and technical challenges that I'm quite sure that we would not try this one
again if we had to go back knowing what we do now.

It's a two-sided marketplace, which means we had the chicken and egg problem
and the network problem. To add on to it, we had to figure out how to build
trust using a medium (Internet) that has been traditionally untrusted.

We had to figure out how to scale customer service for a business where we
quickly found out that people expect good customer service. The Google model
for support wasn't working.

Further, the field is littered with the corpses of, sometimes well-funded,
ventures that have failed in the same space.

And finally, our initial marketing plan involved boots on the ground, kind of
like a political campaign (all the founders met in DC on a political
campaign). That one failed quickly.

The latest, hardest part is scaling the matching engine without using humans.
Not sure I'm at liberty to say exactly how we solved that.

~~~
mladenkovacevic
Thank you for that. I really appreciate the insight. I think in my mental
"simulation" of this type of business I anticipated most of the issues you
mention, but I'm sure there are tons of other details you've run into on a
daily basis.

Playing around with Thumbtack it's really cool how the taxonomy is sort of
intelligent and fluid so if you type in SEO you will get digital marketers or
if you misspell "babysighting" you still get babysitters in your area. And
then the quote request forms are customized for each and every service type.
I'm sure this alone involved a TON of work and experimentation.

------
coup44
Wow. Looks like you guys did a great job. Very cool concept.

~~~
mkbrody
Thanks!

------
ThomPete
If they expand further into facility management the potential is even bigger.

There is a reason why ISS (not the space station) is a multi-billion dollar
company.

~~~
mkbrody
Hello ThomPete, we actually do clean a ton of offices and hope to expand
further into the facility management space :) Thanks for the post!

------
Aardwolf
The site isn't loading for me, but at least it's good to see that it's
myclean.com and not the notorious mycleanpc.com.

~~~
mkbrody
Sorry Aardwolf, <https://www.myclean.com/>

------
tspike
I'm surprised to not see a reference to reddit's /r/EntrepreneurRideAlong --
was this inspired by /u/LocalCaseStudy?

~~~
_sentient
No, these guys have been around since 2010. LocalCaseStudy started late 2011.

------
axusgrad
Great :) My house is kind of dirty, have any advice on how to find a good
cleaner outside of the NYC area?

~~~
mkbrody
I'm not sure where you're located, but you may want to try Angie's List. I
know they have a relationship with quality cleaning companies in many areas:
<http://www.angieslist.com/cleaning/>. Thanks for reading!

~~~
bkmartin
I know in the article you say that outsourcing to third parties did not work
out well for you. If you are willing to point other people to angieslist as an
implied trusted source couldn't you use that as a way to vet your cleaners and
expand to other cities rather quickly?

~~~
mkbrody
Hello bkmartin, our strategy so far has been to hire and train cleaners from
the ground up. We provide training, steady work, and a path to numerous
promotions. I'm not sure we add much value for cleaners who already have a
business?

------
alexchamberlain
Argh company blogs need an easy link back to your website!

------
revelation
Insert mandatory caveat here about fictitious self-employment.

~~~
gojomo
Can you clarify what you mean?

~~~
revelation
If I'm guessing correctly (I searched the website but didn't find any
definitive answer), they are not hiring cleaners themselves, but are instead
outsourcing jobs to cleaners working for themselves.

It's a very common method to avoid all the pesky little taxes and legal
liabilities that come with actually employing someone. It's also russian
roulette for your company if the IRS decides your outsourcing partners are not
actually real companies.

(I think the confusion is because of the term "ficticious self-employment"? I
searched for a translation and that was the best I could find. I would welcome
anyone to tell me what the actual colloquial term for this is)

~~~
mkbrody
Hello revelation, all of our employee's are W-2 employee's and work full-time
for our company. We pay payroll tax for each employee and while the economics
is not as beneficial as the contractor model, if we were ever audited we would
be just fine. Thanks, Mike

