Pondering Homejoy’s Failure -by Hunter Davis
This is a great reflection on SoLoMo business, a.k.a, O2O in China market. In a lot of cases in O2O, people are not building a full package of product, but a product embedded in the whole service chain, given the nature of business.
As Hunter put it, “The Homejoy product was about facilitating the payments, scheduling, and demands of a cleaning.” They couldn’t penetrate deeper and become an important force in the cleaning service. Obviously, the most important force is still cleaner and house owner.
Service variability(cleaning quality, owners’ expectation, service experience) causes most of problems. Software is hard to deal with those problems.
One more thing, I don’t agree with his point that “growth didn’t fix everything”. Growth fixes everything. Homejoy’s problem is they drove growth by lowering the price so much that it can hardly become an organic way to grow.
Here is the full article.
