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Comment by emmett | Hacker News Reader

And now I am sad again because cleaning service discovery is still broken. Not that you're wrong, just that it would be really nice to be able to find cleaners through a service with good reputation tracking and recommendation. Which is intrinsically difficult to build for exactly the reason you specify.

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I asked my neighbor about cleaners, they use X and gave me her phone number. I called X and she did an amazing job. Turns out, X has a higher incentive to clean my house because she can synchronize timing with my neighbor and reduce her overhead cost. The arrangement has worked great for everyone, running 9 years in a row and more neighbors have joined.

I see this as an ideal win-win experience for all parties involved. It would be really nice to have a service that can create this type of experience at scale.

Talking to Your Neighbour as a Service? Asking People You Trust for Recommendations as a Service? I'm not sure there's a VC-growth business to be had in there exactly.

I mean, Airbnb kinda tried to the latter by getting you to add your Facebook friends so you can see their reviews, but I don't get the impression that's gone far.

That's supposedly the thing about Nextdoor, and then rest of the social network ecosystem out there. Unfortunately, more and more people are ditching social network or disallowing apps sharing data, so what do you say?

The problem with this issue is noted by another commenter below: you just started your own business, why pay another middleman?

They should start then considering owning their operations or assets and not renting them like what happened with Homejoy. It seemed at least from this analysis to me that they were on the fence all the time torn between going full-scale and building a reputable home cleaning business that's adequately equipped for the 21st century life or keep feeding off those maids through commissions into perpetuity which is totally unrealistic in my opinion.

This indecisiveness and the lack of vision or clarity of business goals really cost the company very dearly in execution and contributed to their demise

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