tvjunky

Agree but this is bigger than an Onstar feature clone. This is data. Now there is always on driving data from everyone with a new ford, not just a Ford AND AA plugged in.

What about Thumbtack, Angies, Handy, Yelp and HomeAdvisor?

What did Homjoy do that these guys aren't?

Tidy gave it a shot for a while and has pivoted to SaaS. They also used contactors. (edit: looks like they are still cleaning with contractor also)

Docker and AWS ECS or Fargate are what your're looking for.

I think you're heavily discounting the "that's the way we always done it syndrome". However, they were willing to give the "kid" a shot.

Additionally in a court decision from last year, accessing public data is legal. https://parsers.me/us-court-fully-legalized-website-scraping...

Curious about your food choices. I've been experimenting with IF. More specifically I'd call it more like timed eating because the bulk of my fasting hours and during sleep. I'm down 20 lbs with solid numbers. As a side note I have some genetic factors as well and trying to counter those.

State specific rules are all trumped by IRS rules when federal withholding is involved (always). The reason companies use contractors is to make the contractor responsible for federal withholding as it provides higher cash flow. There is a clear IRS test that almost all of these companies fail. Is the contractor wearing a company branded T-shirt? Yep: Employee. It's not all that grey, it's about enforcement and risk tolerance. However, I'm not arguing the FTE vs. contractor point. It doesn't apply here.

For reference: https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/understanding-employee-vs-contr...

I'm saying, at the most basic level, unless the company is specifically offering a "match making" service, the service provider is stealing from the company by cutting the company out of revenue they expected to collect. None of these services advertise as match makers. Examples of match makers in this space are yelp, angies list, thumbtack, home adviser. They each have a clearly different busines model from Wag.

Like I said though, this applies to any company. If a company has made the effort to attract and close the customer with some expectation of LTV, that value can be realized in a couple of ways. 1. Providing service to that customer in perpetuity. 2. Selling that customer to a service provider at a price that provides a profit. If the service provider cuts the company out without compensation, the provider has taken unfair advantage by being on both sides of the transaction, having nothing invested and being compensated for the work completed before stealing the customer.

*"In the case the match making firm is providing no value, I think most contractors would eventually decide to take a customer on directly."

I think you are applying the idea of value in the wrong place. The company has no obligation to provide anything except agreed upon financial compensation to the service provider. It's the break down in value to the customer where many of these services have fallen. In that case the customer can shop for a new service. It does not mean that the service provider can use their unfair advantage and build a business from the unhappy customer. Because in that case, the "match maker" did provide value. It provided the LTV of that stolen customer to the service provider. This, again, is why Wag is also applying a fee to the service provider. For the provider, stay on the platform, get paid or pay for the customers to build your own thing. What's wrong with that?

In my view theft is the same contractor or not. Both has an obligation to the company providing the work. I agree that a happy employee is less likely to try to steal customers but, the ethics gets a bit muddy for some. In those cases (in my own experience) the threat of a big stick is often enough. This applies to any business that puts trust in it's workers to handle customers or customer information.

With respect to your "enough value" statement, I understand. It also requires regular reminders about the level of service the customer gets from the company, not the individual. But that can't be all. Seriously, lots of businesses are like this. They need to trust their team to hold up their side of the basic work agreement.

Take a bar for example. If the bartender starts skimming cash through one of the various means, that's clear theft and depending on the amount, can be a felony. The threat of getting caught might be enough for most but, it still happens. It's messy dealing with people and we unfortunately need to do things that protect the company.

I'm not sure what valuation and funding have to do with a business model. Walmart looses more than 300mil in in theft per year. Should they be looking to get out of retail? This is just one problem every business has to deal with in one way or another.

source from 2015 but reported shrink is still around 1%: https://www.reuters.com/article/wal-mart-stores-theft/correc...

Then many more business are equally bad. ETF on your phone contract? Why? Because number portability. Lots of other businesses have implemented something similar. WAG has investment to protect on each customer it acquires. Just adding the thought of additional cost might reduce customer churn. Contractor or not, why is it not thought of as theft if a service provider contacts the customer directly? It seems to me that Wag is providing all the services you describe. In return for that investment they are trying to discourage customers from thinking they can save a buck and contractors from thinking they can build their own businesses on Wags dime.

Lots of mention of disintermediation here. What about the relationship between the customer and the company? There are many ways a company with many employees provides value over the initial "discovery". What if schedules need to be adjusted? What if the service provider is sick? What if the service provider breaks something or worse? The business is offering a service not service provider. Take this another way. What about a smaller version of this business? "Bobs dog walking" grows to more customers than Bob can walk in a day. Bob adds employees. Is Bob just a match maker now?

I see this "match making" idea come up a lot. Why do you consider Wags in the same way as Tinder? If a dog walker (let's call him Bob) was doing well and wanted to scale his business. Bob hires 10 dog walkers by sharing his customer pool and adding more customers. Is it "match making" when Bob sends one of his employees to a new job?

I think Homejoy failed for more reasons than Disintermediation. One major issue all the early versions of this model missed is that a service like this are not a car ride. One time service volume doesn't cover customer acquisition. Logistics and customer service plays a huge role as well. Homejoy had a hard time handling not normal situations like: cleaners not showing up, substandard work (subjective), or locked doors. It appeared to me that scale was the main mission.

BTW, how do you justify cutting out the company in these services? Because they are contractors? If they were FTE's would it be different? Seriously asking because I want to understand.

Not trying to be rude, but have a real question. Why do you feel that it's ok for you to cut Rover out of the deal? Disintermediation is always mentioned in these sorts of conversations. I'm interested to understand how people justify it.

I agree with everything here, except the implication that this is only related to the self employed or ACA. Health Insurance companies have been pushing these high deducible + HSA plans for 15 years. They also raised the cost of the older less complicated PPO types plans. This has pushed even the biggest companies to "encourage" employees to "take control of their health care". Oh and each year, the definition of "high" keeps getting bumped. 10 years ago deductibles were $1500.

This, plus, just start. There are lots of things you won't know, always. You'll need to dig in and figure out what you need to know. Outsourcing is a good option for things if you have the money. However, you need to understand what you're paying for.

This is exactly right. I live in a large TX metro area and we're inundated with these "ER in a Box" facilities. We also have at least three major full service hospitals in that 5 mile radius. The majority of these places are just a re-branding, with higher fees, of the older "Doc in box" model. Over and over again we hear stories of people visiting these places for fairly minor things, like stitches or back pain that are slapped with $2000 bills because they are "out of network" or coded as ER visits. If you have a real emergency, they call 911 and have you transported.

Going to the ER is a very common thing for many people. Even for cold and flu. So yes, they aren't getting general exams or long term care. They are getting immediate symptom based care in the most expensive way possible. This goes back to the issue mentioned above. People wait too long, go to the ER when it hurts but, it's too late.

The "middle class" you're referring to is literally everyone who has insurance. This has nothing to do with income. Non-payment is not the cause of the high prices. The system is broken in a number of ways. Premiums are a crazy percent of income, putting them out of reach for people who don't have employer subsidized plans. Even then, those employer subsidized plans get more expensive and provide less with each re-enrollment. Here is a small personal example of someone who works in tech for a very large enterprise and is lucky to have the means to handle it: I went to the ER for an issue, admitted for 6 days with a myriad of tests to diagnose. The total bill for that was over $100k. Even though I went to one hospital nearly, $40k of those billings were "out of network" and I had no choice in the matter. I easily met my high deductible but, there were still random bills "not covered". That made my part nearly 10k. This open enrollment period, my employer has decided to drop all "out of network" support because only 10% of the workforce used it in the past. So, if I were to have an issue like this again, my part would be in the neighborhood of $50k for a few test and few days in a bed. That's a scary prospect for a lot of people. For some, letting a bill like that go to collections may be their only option.

This. "Then" is also capitalized. I'm glad I'm not the only one who sees this.

Yes, this is an interesting question. Watching PathJoy become HomeJoy and then close, I assumed (wrongly I guess) that they had moved from the match making concept into an actual cleaning company that owned the whole process. This BTW is how traditional companies keep employees from stealing clients. The employment has greater value than the single client. At any rate, it's more obvious in this latest iteration that they think there is a platform play here.

Sure if you assume HomeJoy as a lead Gen model, loyalty on both sides could be a problem. HomeJoy generally positioned their service like that. However, I don't think that was the intent in the long term. If loyalty is a problem with a service business then your customer acquisition has a flaw (high discount) or you provide no additional value to the customer (quality control, customer service, insurance, backup cleaners).Certainly the loyalty problem exists with "traditional" services as well. The big franchises stay in business by first providing good service and second loyal workers. Those factors plus acquiring the right kind of customer provides the recurring revenue this type of business needs to survive.

I think you have this a bit backward. The cleaning business is at it's core, a recurring revenue business. Cleaning at regular intervals keeps the cost down (time) and builds back profit if the first cleaning was discounted. Moving on the other hand is something you don't need often and is harder forecast revenue. In either case the employee/contractor problems exists.

That part of the story is just an example. The point of the story is the argument Uber is using in the lawsuit. Uber maintains it's not a taxi service and therefore not responsible for the drivers actions or the accessibility of the vehicle. Additionally, suggesting that this is a 1% problem like it's a minor edge case bug is outrageously insensitive. This problem impacts real people.

would you be interested in sharing your setup or pointers toward a good solution with Serilog? I found that something other than a basic setup requires a good chuck of effort to get going. For example, configuration (all code) and IOC.

I think you're asking about Dapper (ORM) which could be compared to Entity Framework. The two major things to think about if comparing would be simplicity and speed. Dapper is simple to setup and use. It uses standard SQL and it's very fast. On the other hand, this is not a fair comparison. EF is has many more features and options. Use the right tool for the right job depending on requirements. Elmah and NLog are not apples to apples either. Elmah make dealing with "Unhandled" exceptions very simple. Nlog is for application logging (Trace, Info) and exception management (A try catch scenario).

I assume this is intended to promote this project? I have used this for while on a couple of projects and found it to be solid and dead simple. Direct link to source: https://github.com/tobiasahlin/SpinKit

That sounds like the way all traditionally "scheduled" services work. That's what makes me wonder about this model. A scheduled service is just not the same a ride.

The billing makes sense but, can you provide any detail about why scheduling is important to you? Is this really an ad-hoc service for you?

In my experience with HomeJoy and Exec (now HandyBook), they understand the value of recurring revenue and are actively pushing for customers to have regular service. For this kind of service, I would think that would be very normal.

To my knowledge Oncor is not part of EFH. Though I could imagine they were left with some kind of stake after the split. More specifically though, Oncor is only the delivery side. Basically meaning, meters and maintenance. Retail providers contact Oncor to have service started. Oncor then send back usage data which the retail side use to bill the customer. If there is a problem, say a line down, Oncor will dispatch the technician.

This will certainly have no impact on power generation in TX. TXU transitioned all of it's generation / distribution to Luminant / Oncor as part of the buyout. Since TX is deregulated, TXU was a retailer of electricity. I would imagine this will boost sales for the many competitors that have sprung up in recent years.