For many startups, how to expand their services is a big problem

They prepare articles that tell stories and offer operational advice to entrepreneurs to help build good companies. For many startups, how to expand their services is a big problem. Are we going to start over or copy the service when we expand it to a new city? Homejoy Successful service development experience may give you a little inspiration.

Two years ago, Aaron and Adora Cheung (pictured below) launched the hourly service Homejoy. In the first one months, Homejoy's service model was similar to that of the traditional hourly service. However, in this past, they found two problems: (1) to help customers clean the house is not an easy task, (2) The current market, the commonly used hourly service model inefficient, quality of service is not high, so there are huge business opportunities.

Initially, there were more than 10 cleaners using the Homejoy platform and many customers. If the reasonable allocation of limited cleaners to provide customers with efficient housing cleaning services has become a very small problem. The traditional use of Excel forms makes it difficult to take into account factors such as traffic time, rest time, and changes in customer schedules. As an engineer, Cheung found that a software is a good solution to this problem.

Homejoy is created to provide users with efficient, high-quality housing cleaning services. In just six months, Homejoy's services have been successfully extended to more than 30 cities in the United States and Canada. Not long ago, Homejoy also set up a new office in London as a stronghold for the expansion of the European market.

In a recent interview with First Round review, Adora Cheung shared the strategy and valuable experience of Homejoy to expand its services to more than 30 cities in two countries within 6 months, while ensuring a high quality of service.

For any start-up that creates artificial services like Homejoy and Uber, the first principle you should keep in mind is that you can't start all over again every time you expand your service to a new place. What you need is a practical, automated and workable plan. Every time we extend our services to a new city, we will learn something new and fine-tune our plans.

In the process of extending services to a new city, Cheung and her team often think and solve the following issues:

(1) According to the market size and opportunity of the business provided by oneself, carefully judge the next time to expand the service to which market.

(2) Every time the service is extended to a new city, to ensure that the initial recruitment of the staff is in line with the development needs of the company, in this respect must work hard, because they are you in the city's future development plans to implement the key.

(3) to invest enough time and energy to control the quality of service from top to bottom, no matter which city you extend the service to, this quality of service control methods can be replicated, without exception.

(4) to the cleaners and customers should continue to pay attention to the time to find ways to provide both sides with new support and help.

(5) In order to streamline the business process, no matter when and where, once the opportunity to find ways to dig data.

"Do it in a process and write it down." Continuously optimize each step. ”

I. Finding opportunities

Before we expand our services to a new city, our core team in San Francisco will be conducting extensive research into the city. What we are investigating is not limited to "is the market big enough?" "The question.

Although the cleanliness of the house and everyone is closely related, but this can not determine the new station to enter which city is more appropriate. In the case of Homejoy, we first expanded our services from San Francisco to Los Angeles before entering New York and Chicago because Homejoy had a better understanding of the city of Los Angeles. Before entering a new market, a certain understanding of the market is essential.

Before extending your service to a new place, Cheung recommends that you pay special attention to the following three questions:

(1) What is the current market demand for your service? According to the current trend, what will happen in the future?

(2) What are the main marketing channels for the city? How do you get users and how much does it cost to get users?

(3) What is the status of service providers in this city? Take Homejoy, for example, is the dustman willing to work with Homejoy? Sometimes the answer is no, in this case, the need for their own services to promote the appropriate marketing.

In Cheung's view, the uniqueness of the Homejoy is that it can not only turn the house clean into a visual engineering optimization problem, it can also use its own software to solve every problem encountered in the process, to ensure that the service quality and efficiency. In order to be able to make their services quickly recognized in a city, Homejoy fully consider the benefits of both the cleaners and customers.

Two. Optimize the process everywhere

There is always some obvious place to start in making things more efficient. For me, the most obvious thing I've found to be more efficient is to book a home cleaning service online. In order to optimize the process of booking a home cleaning service online, Homejoy needs to do a heavy behind-the-scenes job in advance. Not only do they need to have interviews, background checks and trials for cleaners, they also need to design a scheduling system to butt cleaners and customers well. All of this work needs to be performed efficiently, ensuring efficiency is much higher than when customers or cleaners are acting alone.

We did a market survey before we created Homejoy. When respondents were asked if they were willing to pay 20-30 dollars per hour for a professional to work on their home cleaning, their general response was: "That would be great, but I really don't know where to look." ”。 Before Homejoy, if you search for related services on the Internet, it is difficult to find a home cleaning service that is price-assured and the quality of service can be guaranteed.

In order to enable more cleaners to use the Homejoy platform, Homejoy launched the online application function. Although the application process is more complicated, it can effectively filter out those cleaners who are really willing to work with us and eliminate those who are not very interested in working with us. In this program we selected the cleaners, and we will arrange a telephone interview next.

Cheung offers the following recommendations to the founders of companies that use and Homejoy similar business models:

(1) Try to make use of your knowledge of the main business areas to make the best of what you are doing before trying to expand your service quickly.

(2) Pay close attention to the pattern operation. If you find yourself or your team doing the same work 3-4 times, try to automate the workflow and avoid other problems as you automate the process.

(3) Only when you have written down all the workflow to form a template, you can consider extending the service to other places. This will enable you to quickly expand new markets with existing process templates and make few mistakes in the middle. This is very important.

When we extend our business from San Francisco to Los Angeles, the process is like this: I pass a workflow document to a person and say, "Do it." The person receiving the file is also smart enough to quickly complete the work we expect him to do. As the founder of the job, you must learn to find someone like that. In the process of company expansion, you can not do anything to parents.

"It's fine to start manually, but always think about ways to automate your work," he said. ”

Three. Find the right City operations manager

When Homejoy entered a new city, it first sent specialized personnel to investigate the city. But the most important job is to choose the most suitable city operations manager from among the many candidates, which is crucial to Homejoy future development in the city.

We usually look ahead to the candidates for the city operations manager before we extend our services to a new city, and once the Homejoy is officially stationed in the city, we will be able to interview these candidates immediately.

In general, urban operations managers need to have the following qualities and competencies: first, they need to have a good understanding of the city, and secondly, they need to know what the challenges of home cleanliness usually involve, and secondly, they need to have a good operational capacity because, in general, A city operation manager usually needs to work with hundreds of cleaners.

We find that the best city operations managers are those who know how to work together with the cleaners dispersed in many places and know how to guarantee quality service.

The most important job for all city operations managers is to identify and validate talent. In Homejoy, this means that all cleaners who want to use the Homejoy platform to perform on-site cleaning tests. Only the cleaners who pass the test can use the Homejoy platform to provide cleaning services. Homejoy is using this method to ensure the quality of service, which is in the hands of city operations managers.

Four. Expansion of services only if the quality of service is ensured

Because the quality of service of Homejoy mainly depends on the cleaners, the company spends more time on recruiting than the general company. Now many startups are using video interviews and other methods to interview, but Cheung and her team insist on face-to-face interviewing, which makes it easier to make more detailed and intuitive visits to candidates. All of our city operations managers are aware of this, so we decided to stick with the interview.

"Word of mouth marketing can usually bring you the most valuable talent recommended." ”

When we enter a new city, we often do not know any local people, we usually use the traditional services such as Craigslist. You have to learn to think, take into account the interests of independent professional cleaners, and then try your best to gain their trust. This is the only way we can achieve word-of-mouth marketing. In every city.

In fact, not only for cleaners, but also for customers. First of all, you must do a good job in the early stage of marketing, and then rely on Word-of-mouth marketing. If customers are satisfied with the services we offer, they will have word of mouth so that we can easily get new customers.

In the process of extending services to new cities, the Cheung recruitment list can be summarized as follows:

(1) To recruit the city operation manager who both know the clean professional knowledge and pay attention to the service quality.

(2) Try to find as many cleaning service providers as possible. This includes the early marketing work.

(3) determine the recruitment criteria. Understand the characteristics of good cleaning service providers, and then quantify these features to make recruiting decisions easier.

We've worked with a lot of independent cleaners and many of them have wanted to find jobs on their own. However, the Homejoy platform provides a simpler, more flexible, and easier way to find work opportunities. If you can do this, you will not be able to find a service provider to cooperate with you.

Every week we receive thousands of requests for cooperation from cleaners, and the challenge is to sift through the cleaners we are willing to work with. Of all applicants, only a small number of them can enter the phone interview, and fewer people can enter face-to-face interviews. After face-to-face interviews, we will conduct extensive and detailed background checks on candidates.

In the process of expanding the service of Homejoy, we have tried repeatedly and finally have the operating system. In the process, we will inevitably make some mistakes, lose something, but we never retreat. We will adjust the whole system according to the actual situation to prevent future mistakes.

Five. Don't forget you have two clients

In the process of Homejoy development, Cheung will often face the doubts from cleaners, many cleaners do not believe that two young people can completely subvert the industry they have been working in it for several years. In this context, Homejoy must have the trust of the cleaners as an important task for the company. They need to demonstrate that the traditional cleaning service industry needs to be improved and that its own service model is trustworthy.

Many of the cleaners we worked with were accustomed to the previous pattern, and in the traditional mode, it was normal to fail to get paid on time. Without a group of trustworthy, friendly and detail-oriented cleaners, Homejoy is difficult to expand rapidly. So in a sense, these cleaners became the company's first customers. With such a first batch of customers, Homejoy to get more trust from the cleaners by bringing a bit of value to the cleaners. Homejoy not only pays the cleaners handsomely on time but also provides them with a more flexible way of working.

An important concept shared by all members of the Homejoy team is to help clients and professional cleaners build happier families.

Cheung recommends that all service-based technology companies do the same. You have to realize that you have two clients and they have different needs. Don't ignore another customer because one of the customers brings benefits to you. Everyone on the Homejoy team knows that our platform has two types of customers, customers who need a home cleaning service and independent professional cleaners. We have our own support team for both of these customers.

Making cleaning service providers happy and motivating their enthusiasm plays an important role in Homejoy the process of replicating services from one city to another.

Six. All means to collect data

To please both sides of the service, this requires a good grasp of the quality of service. Homejoy is not the only way to get data by giving customers a scoring rating on cleaning services.

Whenever Homejoy the service to a new city, Cheung will communicate face-to-face with the local cleaners. One of the deepest impressions of her was her interaction with Homejoy's first candidate in the city of San Jose. They talked for a good few hours, and finally Cheung succeeded in gaining the trust of each other and persuading each other to join the Homejoy. There are a lot of such exchanges.

Cheung said that understanding the needs of cleaners, the background and the reasons for joining the Homejoy is very useful for the company to make relevant decisions later.

"Don't always think about expansion, think about how to ensure the correctness of the whole process." ”

Whenever you go to a city, Cheung will find opportunities to communicate with local cleaners. This organic method of data collection is consistent with the idea that Homejoy continues to improve operations. While the speed of expansion is important, it cannot be the dominant force. Cheung admits that rapid expansion is the only thing that keeps her awake at night. Let her sleep at night is not Homejoy has been stationed in the number of cities, the speed of expansion is how fast, but how to continue to provide five-star service.

Homejoy will then put customer satisfaction at the more core level of the company, and the company will also create a strong data science team to better analyze the needs and expectations of customers and cleaners, and then use the best way to meet these needs and expectations.