The Ultimate Vision For Homejoy Is Not Just Cleaning, According To CEO Adora Cheung

On-demand home services company Homejoy has been providing cleaning services over the last few years, but it’s hoping to expand into several other verticals. Today at TechCrunch Disrupt Europe, co-founder and CEO Adora Cheung said the company would continue to test out other services in its different markets.

Today Homejoy is in 30 cities around the world, including London, where the service launched in April. In fact, London is the company’s fastest-growing market and is comparable to Homejoy’s presence in New York City, Cheung said.

It’s also moved into other European cities like Berlin and Paris. Over the next few months and into the first quarter of next year, she said Homejoy will be expanding aggressively into other cities on the continent. Even though it has a playbook for launching each new market, every city requires individual care to gain the reputation it needs among cleaning professionals and customers.

“Every time you launch in a new market, it’s like launching a new startup,” she said. That mostly involves building up the supply of cleaners in each city in order to meet eventual demand. Once it’s reached 100 cleaners on its platform, it considers that city launched.

In addition to new cities, the company also has ambitions for other services. It’s been testing out things like handyman and light plumbing and electrical services in certain markets. That’s something it will continue until it finds those which it thinks can scale.

“The ultimate vision for Homejoy is not just cleaning,” Cheung said. “We will be testing out all of these different verticals and scale out the ones that go well.”

Homejoy has come a long way since Adora and her brother Aaron first entered the business. Cheung says she cleaned customer homes for about four months in part to meet demand, but also to learn about the needs of the cleaning professionals working on the platform.

“It taught us a lot about how cleaning professionals work and the tools we needed to build to make their lives easier,” she said. That includes things like the scheduling and booking flow, and creating a better algorithm for matching customers and service professionals. Now Homejoy thinks can apply those learnings to scale other services as well.

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