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Comment by sakopov | Hacker News Reader

I'm sure they'd have problems running a sustainable cleaning business on $30/h considering taxes, supply costs and other fees you'd have to pay as a business owner.

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That is a great reason why they never should have tried to approach this as a business where they employ cleaners. If they were just a service to hook up cleaners and customers, the pricing would not be a problem. You'd avoid all of it, and so would the cleaners and the customers. Step in the middle and say 'I employ the cleaners' and, bam, you have just destroyed the entire concept. You've just radically restricted your geographic reach. You've massively multiplied the cost to EVERYONE, including yourself, your customers, the cleaners, everyone. The cleaners are immediately divorced from receiving benefits of efficiency improvements. If they become more productive, their employer pays them the same (or less) and expects continued improvements. As opposed to actually making more money for less work, the way productivity improvement is supposed to work.

There are a million cleaner lead generation companies... They all suck.

What are their weaknesses? Do they mostly only deal with cleaning companies rather than individuals? I know that with cleaning there are certain concerns when it comes to being bonded and whatnot since you're going into peoples homes, but I don't know a great deal about it. I'd love it if there was a nice site I could hit up to find a cleaner in my area or get bids from multiples for what I want. For instance, the few places I've searched out myself around here insist that they come every week, won't even take laundry down to the laundry room, etc. There are more and more sites every day that would let me locate people to do work without having to pay the overhead necessary to keep an entire corporate structure oiled and upright even though they're not providing any service technology couldn't do better and for almost no cost. I just don't know of any for cleaning, and I expected this to be one of them... was a bit disappointed when I found out it wasn't. Even if they are hugely successful, I can't imagine them expanding to West Virginia any time soon.

I accidentally filled out a leadgen form for movers once. What it did was forward my personal information to 20 different moving companies who contacted me individually wanting me to fill out the same detailed paperwork 20 times about my move for a quote.

It's tragic because you can't turn off the inbound calls. There's no one thing to block.

Lead gen in general is an internet history lesson. The focus on local/reviews over the last few years was intended to be the fix for the trash lead gen created. The fact is, the vast majority of businesses like this are very small (even the franchises) and there is no corporate structure. They only make a profit if the come every week and they need to set limit on the kinds of things they do. For most of these, Google does a good job of putting the customer and service together even if reviews are another waste land. The missing questions are: is this service what I want and is it worth paying for?

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