←back to thread

Didn’t Homejoy Shut Down?

(medium.com)
1121 points alokedesai | 2 comments | 28 Oct 15 19:51 UTC | HN request time: 1.118s | source
Show context
aarontcheung ◴[28 Oct 15 22:42 UTC] No.10467925[source]▶
I'm one of the founders of Homejoy. I'm still very passionate about the home service space. After leaving Homejoy, I started FlyMaids, where we're exploring a few different angles on the space.

We recently acquired the customer and service provider data from Homejoy.

We're a small team that has been focused on moving quickly while bootstraping. We tried to quickly test different approaches, but we realize now that we did so in an unclear manner. We recognize the need to use the data we acquired responsibily. As a result, we're taking the site down, and we're going to do a better job with our testing moving forward.

replies(30): >>10467939 #>>10467957 #>>10467983 #>>10467987 #>>10467997 #>>10468007 #>>10468009 #>>10468010 #>>10468016 #>>10468028 #>>10468043 #>>10468068 #>>10468072 #>>10468078 #>>10468091 #>>10468187 #>>10468193 #>>10468221 #>>10468225 #>>10468376 #>>10468464 #>>10468597 #>>10468684 #>>10468700 #>>10468782 #>>10468805 #>>10468825 #>>10469434 #>>10472300 #>>10505131 #
aarontcheung ◴[29 Oct 15 05:24 UTC] No.10469434[source]▶
I wanted to follow up and address some concerns mentioned in this thread, and acknowledge that I definitely made mistakes.

How did you get my information? We acquired Homejoy’s domain and customer information through an ABC process. Our intention is to improve and then relaunch Homejoy’s cleaning service. We were testing a new model using Fly Maids, one of our testing brands. As evidenced today, we made some mistakes.

Why is your email and website so misleading? When we contacted customers, we didn’t tell them we were Homejoy relaunching because we wanted to gauge reception to our new model without the influence of Homejoy’s brand.

As a result, we scared many customers, who expected the worst had happened to their data. We should have told customers upfront who we were, what we were testing, and used original content.

Do you have my credit card info? No, as of Oct 28 2015, we deleted all credit card info, including the last 4 digits. Also, the Homejoy Stripe account has been permanently shut down so no one can get access to it in any manner.

At no point did we ever charge a Homejoy customer’s credit card.

How do I delete my account information to ensure that it is not used in any way? Please go here http://goo.gl/forms/YPdJlYJ9Pn

replies(8): >>10469455 #>>10469488 #>>10469545 #>>10469569 #>>10469706 #>>10469874 #>>10469948 #>>10471752 #
1. chris_wot ◴[29 Oct 15 09:36 UTC] No.10469948[source]▶
Uh! This is making things worse, not better!!!!

1. You now acknowledge you intentionally lied to customers by saying you were redirecting them to a "partner", but it's the same company under a different name.

2. You don't hold that data under a payment provider like Stripe, and yet you claim to have PCI-DSS compliance but are violating it and risking a lot of customer credit card data!

You now say you have deleted that data, but how are we meant to believe you? Where was that data stored? Locally or with Stripe? Why didn't you encrypt it?

How did you "acquire Homejoy’s domain and customer information through an ABC process"? How does that even work?!

replies(1): >>10473508 #
2. chris_wot ◴[29 Oct 15 19:13 UTC] No.10473508[source]▶
robhunter has pointed out that ABC is something entirely different, and explained here: http://bankruptcy.cooley.com/2008/03/articles/business-bankr...