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Comment by ghaff | Hacker News Reader

After reading this, I'm left to ponder why anyone would think this was a potential "unicorn" business where it made sense to take big losses to grow revenue. After all, as the article notes, cleaning services like Merry Maids are a well-established thing. (As are personal references for housecleaners.) That doesn't make a potential new entrant bringing a better UX to the process a stupid idea. But it would seem to limit the potential opportunity.

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Maybe ask sama? Homejoy was a YC company and Adora even game a lecture during the most recent Startup School. I'd personally like to see a "lessons learned from failed YC companies" lecture next time since it seems we're starting to see more high-profile failures in the market, often based on high-growth with negative margins.

> After all, as the article notes, cleaning services like Merry Maids are a well-established thing.

But so are the taxi companies and hotel chains.

Well, the taxi experience has oft-discussed problems in many places. And AirBnB is typically a different experience from chain hotels. There's also the skirting of regulation thing in the "sharing" economy. But leave that aside and Uber/Lyft and AirBnB are still qualitatively different in many ways from the incumbents they're competing with. (Not saying they're universally better, just different.) However, it's hard for me to see Homejoy as being much different from a cleaning service.

Exactly.

The very idea of investing in a unicorn business is that it will either corner the market or go bankrupt, is it not?

How anyone can imagine that they can corner the market in this industry is beyond me!

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