Didn’t Homejoy Shut Down?

Everyone is assuming that the founders sold the company data to Fly Maids, a brand-new company nobody has ever heard of before.

It's also possible one of the founders just spun up the new service themselves and copied over all of the customer records. If so, they may want to prepare to be sued by their previous investors.

It's one thing to fail after giving it the good ol' college try, but it's another entirely to strip the copper out of the walls on your way out.

Speculation aside, they should put out a statement to clarify the relationship between the companies and what's going on with their customers' data.

That was my first assumption as well - that one of the founders was continuing to work with the same idea under a different brand.

Whoever it was, they clearly capitalized on the market opening left in Homejoy's wake. A quick

  whois flymaids.com

yields

  Domain Name: flymaids.com
  Registry Domain ID: 1966895891_DOMAIN_COM-VRSN
  Registrar WHOIS Server: whois.godaddy.com
  Registrar URL: http://www.godaddy.com
  Update Date: 2015-10-08T04:34:58Z
  Creation Date: 2015-10-08T04:34:58Z
  Registrar Registration Expiration Date: 2016-10-08T04:34:58Z
  Registrar: GoDaddy.com, LLC
  Registrar IANA ID: 146
  Registrar Abuse Contact Email: abuse@godaddy.com
  ...
  Registrant Organization: Domains By Proxy, LLC
  ...

The site was only created in the last 3 weeks, and it was registered by someone who wanted to stay anonymous (which is, in fairness, very reasonable - Homejoy cofounder or not. Certainly not enough to draw a conclusion).

As part of winding down they could have sold off their data to an interested party, not different from a merger, and they further could have hired some of the old team.

If someone just copied the db and then sold or gave it on the sly, investors of former unaware, then, yes, problematic. But if it was a transaction approved by the principals of the former, unfortunately, there aren't stipulations about commutability of customer data, are there?

Well, according to their Privacy Policy you can just shoot them an e-mail:

> You may contact us as follows: support@flymaids.com.com

Oh wait....

[Bonus points for saying they are incorporated in Delaware who has no record of a business by that name.]

*Edit- See below, I searched the company name on the Delaware website two different ways and they certainly do not have an active registration or even a name reservation.

Every startup is incorporated in Delaware, not always as the name they call themselves.

Except they gave me the name to look up[1]:

"In the USA/rest of the world (excluding the European Union), we are Fly Maids, Inc. (doing business as Fly Maids), a Delaware corporation with our head office at 2711 Centerville Road, Suite 400, Wilmington, New Castle County, Delaware 19808."

Trust me, it isn't there. I tried both the regular lookup and just a simple name reservation in case the paperwork hadn't gone through yet. No results for either.

[1] http://www.flymaids.com/privacy

They could have actually sold the entire company, so this is just a new skin on top of the old software.

Not incorporated in Delaware (as represented) nor are they qualified to do business in CA (where they are, presumably, physically located)...Probably not the company you want coordinating strangers into your home, though something tells me this is par for the SV course. You know move fast and break things, or beg forgiveness rather than ask permission. However, my advice owners/operators, they might wish to consult a lawyer to explain the basics of personal liability and benefits of corporate protections...

Domain registrars often include a year of "whoisguard" (namecheap's brand for it) or similar with new domain registrations. I'm never too surprised by that until it's been over a year. Or is Domains By Proxy a more significant anonymity system?

Oh yeah, totally forgot about the part that they were trying to do business in Los Angeles...

I presume this is language that was copied straight from the website of the competitor

s/homejoy/flymaids.com

FAIL...

They're all pretty much the same - just who is controlling it. Domains by Proxy is GoDaddy's version.