Miso (YC S16) offers high quality on-demand home cleaning in South Korea | Hacker News Reader

Miso (YC S16) offers high quality on-demand home cleaning in South Korea

themacro.com

37 pointsstvnchn39 comments

Hi, I am Victor, another co-founder at Miso. Just arrived at SFO to take part in this summer's YC batch.

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

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.

Do you plan to blog about the experience? If so, where? :)

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?

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

This "miso"? This one? https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%EB%AF%B8%EC%86%8C

That is correct. :)

What are you planning to do with the capital?

Are you employing your cleaners or is the model similar to Homejoy where you are a marketplace for independent cleaners?

We are a marketplace for independent cleaners.

Can they set their own prices then?

No. Our pricing table is simple. 45,000KRW(about $40) for 4 hours, 85000KRW(about $80) for 8 hours.

Then you're not a marketplace for independent cleaners.

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?

It would be a fixed market, not a free market.

Depends on if you're buying from 'the farmers market' or if you're still shopping amongst individual--but price fixed--farmers.

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.

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.

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

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.

Did HomeJoy not have a review system? I honestly don't know. But are you confident this will be enough to differentiate yourself from competitors?

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?

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

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?

>> 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?

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.

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.

"All the capital you raise?" They've raised 190K.

Uber has raised 12.5 Billion dollars.

I didn't say "raised", and a prevailing trend for a successful startups is to raise lots of capital.

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.

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

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

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-...

Nice to meet you! :)

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