
What I learned about online-to-offline - randall
http://justinkan.com/exec-errands-post-mortem
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_sentient
Great points. As someone who has founded a couple tech-meets-meatspace
businesses (including a cleaning company) these observations certainly ring
true.

Another thing I would add, is that people often don't correctly estimate how
much of a pain it can be to deal with customer/worker issues day in and day
out. Most tech companies have limited support access, which greatly reduces
their exposure to angry clients.

But when you're in a services business you are pretty much forced to spend
hours each day talking with angry customers, unreliable providers, and helping
resolve seemingly endless conflicts. You can mitigate some of this with better
systems and tech, but ultimately this burden only increases as you scale. At
the end of the day there will always be a subset of your customers who are
belligerent, unreasonable, or trying to con you outright. And that's to say
nothing of unreliable/dishonest workers.

It can be a great business to be in, but you will need a thick skin, velvet
tongue, and something of an indomitable spirit.

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alaskamiller
1\. Good help is hard to find. If you're smart and capable, you're above that
$20/hr line, and if you're not... well you're just not.

2\. Service business is hard. Customer support can eat up your time, money,
and energy day in, day out. Maybe if one had worked in retail in their youth
they would understand it.

3\. One of the more homegrown trends the past few years has been maid service.
There's a vibrant community on Reddit and blogospheres revolving around
setting up maid services in various localities. They all build off the same
model. Good to see that it's validated by Exec switching to focusing on that.

In the end, these businesses revolving around re-organizing labor structures
and managing people result in the inevitable grand truth: people are complex
creatures, sometimes a person is good, sometimes a person is bad, then
sometimes a person is cheap, and sometimes a person is expensive.

But we keep insisting on using an iPhone app to sort human beings into
quantifiable skillsets then driving down the costs to utilize them. Everyone
serves as little cogs in our lives commanded by our remote control. So future.

~~~
slashedzero
Right. The problem was his misconception with society on the side of the
errand runner. All he seemed to have experience with was the exec who has
tasks needed to be done.

On that note, something like this in a society with very high unemployment and
a large casual labor market could possibly do well (granted, people were
wealthy enough to own smartphones). My partner's family in India would
constantly go through servants/maids/gardners/etc because there're so many
people willing to work.

~~~
george88b
One of my parents is Egyptian and when she was growing up they had multiple
"servants" but each with a different speciality. One was the transportation
(pick up/drop off) guy, one did cleaning, one was the handy man, one was the
doorman/concierge type person, one did shopping, someone watched the kids,
etc.

In effect, there were no errands for the family to ever run because they had
one servant that specialized in one thing but that servant did it for all the
families on the block resulting in a full time job. All the affluent city
blocks had their own network of specialized servants.

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kevingibbon
Surprised nobody is talking about how Homejoy is killing it with the exact
same model that exec pivoted too.

~~~
timr
Perhaps because talking about that doesn't invalidate the points he's making?
It's a hard business.

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jcampbell1
One observation I have made is that when you are transparently keeping a
percentage of revenue from the person actually providing the service, there is
often a huge disconnect between what is perceived as fair, and what is
required to make the service work.

By the time you factor in credit card fees, provision for loss, marketing, the
economics don't work unless you are keeping 30%, and then the people providing
the service feel ripped off.

Unless the service is inherently viral with zero marketing costs, it is really
hard to strike a good balance.

~~~
0ca0
Some of those things, like credit card fees, don't really count as you keeping
it.

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imjk
Is this Justin's 3rd or so exit? Anyone know why he decided to exit the market
so quickly? I got the sense that exec was just getting off the ground.

~~~
rm445
It seems like the business-as-a-startup failed, but remained as a normal
cleaning company: the kind that might provide a perfectly good living to
someone motivated to manage a herd of cleaners, but not a massively-growing
software-based company.

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markhelo
I wonder what he thinks about focusing on one geography vs. opening it up.

