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).

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?