Didn’t Homejoy Shut Down?

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.

Why did you copy Handy's site verbatim? Why did you not give customers the option to opt-in to your new venture? Why did you post the logos of news organizations that had never written you up?

The answer to all of those questions is: they are dishonest.

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

That's all you really need to know about FlyMaids and Homejoy. If I ran a startup into the ground I would never ever betray my customers by selling their data!

> If I ran a startup into the ground I would never ever betray my customers by selling their data!

When you run a business into the ground, some decisions about what you sell get taken over by courts, at the direction of your creditors.

When you trust your data with a company, you're not just trusting its ethics, you're trusting its long term viability too.

You're trusting that they or their acquirers will honor the contracts that they have with you. In the case of Homejoy, my assumption is that the claims/promises they made constitute a contract with their users that limits their ability to make use of your data outside the described scope. IANAL, but I think there's a reason we don't regularly hear about things like this - it's actually hard to do without getting sued.

A contract requires mutual consideration. Whatever someone says in their dying breath doesn't constitute a contract. A last will, perhaps, but not a contract. (To my knowledge, estate law does not apply to corporations.)

The consideration provided by HomeJoy's customers was, naturally, payment.