Founder of Lawn Love here. We think a lot about disintermediation risk.
We do a number of things to prevent it, but it ultimately comes down to providing enough value to the supply side of your market. If you build a product that drives real, ongoing value for your service pros, they will be much less incentivised to cut you out of the transaction. The same is true for the demand side.
Also, lawn care has a reduced risk profile compared to services that take place inside the home (maids/babysitting, etc). There is no key hand-off and the nature of the service is somewhat less intimate. Our customers don't need to be present for the work, which both reduces this risk and boosts the value of our platform as a means of managing your service.
I think one of the issues with Homejoy and disintermediation is that cleaning inside the home is well up the intimacy scale. It's different from say a commercial cleaning service. The risk for the customer is that next time they will send someone different. The new person will be more of an unknown quantity whereas the current cleaner, if they are good, is exactly who the customer wants sent out next time. When this happens, the customer benefits more from coordinating their schedule with the individual cleaner than from the on-demand scheduling via Homejoy.
For Homejoy, saying "we are bonded and insured" reduces reluctance for a first you or when on-demand service is the primary consideration. But for recurring service, having trust with an individual beats the crap out of being able to point to the contract or collect against a bonding agency if something goes wrong.
Do you schedule the customers close by to minimize travel time for your lawn care guys? I know cleaners that drive across town to jobs, effectively losing money while they're stuck in traffic. I don't know if Homejoy did that.
To incentivize that, you could offer discounts for neighbors who use the service together. If Homejoy had a bunch of apartments in one location, then cleaners would make more money per day.
Yep, that's one of our primary value props. Once we reach critical mass in a market we're able to do job clustering and route optimization. More jobs per day + less time spent burning fuel sitting behind a steering wheel means much better economics for our lawn pros.
Aren't lawn care providers already pretty much doing this by means of fragmentation? (i.e. in one suburban town, there are only 3 providers that serve the whole area) What additional value do you guys provide that isn't already there?
That's not actually the case for a market of any scale. More like 1000 providers / market. :)
Also, routing optimization is a fairly hard problem and requires significant critical mass in a geo. Pretty hard for individual service providers to build this on their own. The closest thing may be a small-town service pro who has been in business for 30 years and eventually reached sufficient mass / frequency to optimize his routes, but that's a rare case.
