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How We Bootstrapped a $20K Website into a $4M/year Business
- axusgrad 13y agoGreat :) My house is kind of dirty, have any advice on how to find a good cleaner outside of the NYC area?
- mkbrody 13y agoI'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/ http://www.angieslist.com/cleaning/. Thanks for reading!
- bkmartin 13y agoI 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 13y agoHello 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?
- pbreit 13y agoExec and Homejoy service a few more cities.
- mkbrody 13y agoExec and Homejoy are amazing companies and we have nothing but positive things to say about our competitors. However, I am fairly certain that they 1099 their employee's which means they use independent contractors. This is a different labor model and makes expansion a lot easier. It also has a lot of risks. All MyClean employee's are W-2 employee's and work for the company full-time. We will also be expanding soon!
- gscott 13y agoUsually you can find a cleaner on craigslist who will do so topless. Something none of these homecleaner connection services offer!
- coup44 13y agoWow. Looks like you guys did a great job. Very cool concept.
- mkbrody 13y agoThanks!
- tejay 13y agoWow, fantastic. Cool story too. So, how often was your developer in Canada at the movies when you called? Haha
- mkbrody 13y agoMore often than we'd like! All jokes aside, he's been great and is very reliable for us.
- nthj 13y agoClients 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.
- mkbrody 13y agoYou're right nthj, we didn't mean to complain or to understate the important of amazing development!
- tejay 13y ago> 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!
- ovi256 13y agoWould 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.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- _lex 13y agoWe're building a company in a similar, but different space (http://www.massagejoyspa.com http://www.massagejoyspa.com : in home and office massage therapy), and I'd love to spend 15 minutes on the phone with you picking your brain - can you add a contact email on your HN account, or shoot me an email at lexsebro@stanford.edu? Thanks!
- bvdbijl 13y agoThe images on your website seem to be broken I get this: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <Error><Code>PermanentRedirect</Code><Message>The bucket you are attempting to access must be addressed using the specified endpoint. Please send all future requests to this endpoint.</Message><RequestId>FE87E335979D5055</RequestId><Bucket>img1.massagejoyspa.com</Bucket><HostId>ujDOp9FCaaUyMPoEnqXzd3OwIZK05x8CPa8vJOGKMmjdCbtk76pNeSfI0/Xw8Y3d</HostId><Endpoint>img1.massagejoyspa.com.s3.amazonaws.com</Endpoint></Error>
- _lex 13y agoAlso, it looks like the link to follow myclean on twitter in the upper right corner of the website is broken - it links to https://twitter.com/mycleandotcom https://twitter.com/mycleandotcom instead of https://twitter.com/myclean https://twitter.com/myclean
- _lex 13y ago@bvdbijl - I'm on it. Looks like a S3 issue.
- mkbrody 13y agoBest of luck with your new business lex. Michael Scharf will be reaching out to you shortly.
- codegeek 13y agoGood 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 13y agoWow... 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!
- skrebbel 13y agoWho are you to judge others like that? How much do you know about his situation and choices?
- tmorton 13y agoThat's progress. Normal day-to-day ops used to include sewing clothes, churning butter, and building furniture.
- codegeek 13y agoI understand where you are coming from and I used to be in your shoes until recently. Lately, my time is a lot more valuable and even though I find time for HN :), every minute I spend must be chosen and spent wisely. So for things such as house cleaning (which could be a big deal if you have 3+ beds, 2+ baths and shit load of crap), I would rather outsource to a pro. Can I do it myself ? Hell yea. Would I be doing something else considering my time is critical ? Yep.
- 13y ago
- revelation 13y agoInsert mandatory caveat here about fictitious self-employment.
- gojomo 13y agoCan you clarify what you mean?
- revelation 13y agoIf 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 13y agoHello 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
- patmcguire 13y agoCached version of the blog's front page (has the whole article) http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:BeeWgSXkr4AJ:www.myclean.com/blog/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:BeeWgSX...
- mkbrody 13y agoThank you. Our Canadian developer is working on fixing now!
- t0 13y agoWhy 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 13y agoMaybe 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
- gluczywo 13y agoYou may want to look at Ricardo's comparative advantage concept in economics to answer this question.
- dia80 13y agoIs 4 million breakeven? This is a business with lots of mouths to feed (3 founders and sweat equity engineer) and high variable costs...
- orangethirty 13y agoThis 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!?
- skizm 13y agoseamless does this pretty well
- mesozoic 13y agoAnother example of a company that successfully did this is uShip
- larrys 13y agouship doesn't handle the actual shipping with their trucks and employees. The cleaning services employees the people who do the cleaning. uship is probably more of the concept that the parent commenter was referring to that I replied to though as an example of reducing friction.
- clientbiller 13y agoLogo links to the blog because that is the blog your reading. I clicked it too thinking it would take me to the site.
- mkbrody 13y agoSorry clientbiller, here's the site: https://www.myclean.com/ https://www.myclean.com/
- Aardwolf 13y agoThe 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 13y agoSorry Aardwolf, https://www.myclean.com/ https://www.myclean.com/
- mladenkovacevic 13y agoWhat 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 13y agoLike http://thumbtack.com http://thumbtack.com?
- mladenkovacevic 13y agoYeah 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 13y agoAlthough 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 13y ago
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- thejteam 13y agoAnd 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 13y agoYou'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 13y agoHad 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.
- sailfast 13y agoOn the plus side, there seems to be a dearth of ideas for the not rich that can be equally lucrative, so perhaps it's a leg up toward building the killer app that really helps a lot of people.
- stevekemp 13y agoYou're not alone - I'd clean my house before the cleaners turned up so they'd not judge me for my mess too!
- jazzychad 13y agoyet another sinner of linking the main site logo back to the blog: http://blog.jazzychad.net/2012/05/28/startups-fix-your-blog-links.html http://blog.jazzychad.net/2012/05/28/startups-fix-your-blog-... - please fix!
- mbesto 13y agoChad, I'm in total agreement. Curious, what do you (not just you, but anyone) think of how we implemented it on our site? http://blog.competehub.com/ http://blog.competehub.com/
- brador 13y agoIt 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 13y agoIt's just a matter of editing the theme files.
- mkbrody 13y agoSorry Jazzychad, all will be fixed with the new site! Michael Scharf also sends his apologies to all reading this.
- bratsche 13y agoWere 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 13y agoLots 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.
- alexchamberlain 13y agoArgh company blogs need an easy link back to your website!
- ThomPete 13y agoIf 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 13y agoHello ThomPete, we actually do clean a ton of offices and hope to expand further into the facility management space :) Thanks for the post!
- marcamillion 13y agoI 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.
- ThomPete 13y agoI don't believe it's the MBA but rather the experience people have that make them able to do run a successful company. MBAs aren't making you a good businessman anymore than studying philosophy is making you a good philosopher. You still need the experience and the insights in order to create something like this. But I wholeheartedly agree that you don't need to be a technical co-founder to do a company like this. However you do need someone to do it for you.
- marcamillion 13y agoWell...my point was simply that there is no silver bullet other than a dogged will to get it done. There are many brilliant programmers who will never build a sustainable business because they just don't have the will to get it done. Likewise, there are many MBAs that will be middle management in LargeCo. all their lives for the same reason. It has become Valley lore that u need to be a geek to build a successful business - when it is patently clear that is false. None of the AirBnB guys are geeks - they are designers!
- sixQuarks 13y agoI'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.
- marcamillion 13y agoOk let's use your math. So assume they only get 30K visitors/mo. At a 7% conversion rate (which is listed in the article), if you assume that each clean is on average $50. That's a cool 30,000 * .07 * $50 = $105,000 in revenue from NEW customers every month. - i.e. $1.2M in new revenue per year. If you also assume that what they have been doing in the article is true (i.e. working on keeping customers happy) then they likely have repeat business (given that people always want to keep their place clean), it's definitely possible that with a $1.2M revenue growth yet per year - based on current traffic trends - that they could be doing $4M/year.
- mkbrody 13y agoHello Marcamillion, without going into too many specifics about our numbers we actually get a lot less than 30k unique visitors per month. However, 80% of our business is from repeat customers and our customer retention numbers are very strong. This is the core of our business and how we plan to grow. We have done basically zero off-line marketing.
- marcamillion 13y agoThat's even more impressive than my numbers.
- mkbrody 13y agoThanks Marcamillion, we have a lot of cool idea's around referral incentives and customer rewards points moving forward as well. stay tuned!
- cpeterso 13y agoThere 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 13y agohttps://www.myclean.com/ https://www.myclean.com/ Thanks!
- tspike 13y agoI'm surprised to not see a reference to reddit's /r/EntrepreneurRideAlong -- was this inspired by /u/LocalCaseStudy?
- _sentient 13y agoNo, these guys have been around since 2010. LocalCaseStudy started late 2011.
- at-fates-hands 13y ago>>>>"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 13y agoThanks 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
- n9com 13y agoPosting 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 13y agoGiven 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 13y agoSpeaking 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?
- yeureka 13y agoI 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 http://abelhinha.net
- aymeric 13y agoFor people interested in starting a similar business, there is a subreddit on this: http://www.reddit.com/r/EntrepreneurRideAlong/ http://www.reddit.com/r/EntrepreneurRideAlong/ where someone shows how he builds a service business from scratch.
- andy_boot 13y agoI followed that story for a while - it was really interesting. Its a shame that they splinted off to a private forum.
- peripetylabs 13y agoCongratulations. 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.
- mehuln 13y agoThere 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.
- danielfriedman 13y agoWow! 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 13y ago@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.