Friday, 4th of April 2008 at 02:51:10 PM
New startup BidMyCleaning.com launched this week in Houston and San Diego. The company founder and CEO, Raymond Aker, moved to Houston from San Diego in 2005 to open and manage the local office of AW Cleaning Services. According to company materials, the founding team’s goal in founding BidMyCleaning was
“to remove the pain involved in finding cleaning services for the customer and to allow providers to do what they do best instead of spending their time on logistical issues and marketing efforts.”
The site is touted as a “one-stop-shop” for all of your cleaning services needs where you can bid, screen, select, schedule, rate and even pay for those services online. Along with a nice dashboard, there is a Cleaning Calculator which records all of the details of your home or office and then provides specific quotes back to you on your job requests.
One thing that stood out was their resources section that provided information about “green cleaning.” I could not determine if there were any service providers listed that offered “green cleaning” but if there was, that would be an interesting competitive advantage.
Check out the site and let us know your thoughts. Our community should be about constructive feedback and support. Best of luck to the BidMyCleaning.com team!!!
Intuitive, clean site design – kudos there (although I can’t stop thinking I want to go buy something at Amazon as I look at BidMyCleaning.com’s logo).
Constructive criticisms:
I walked through the bidding process online and the bid came back about $130 *more* than I’ve ever paid for a house cleaning (ouch!). I will admit to over estimating a bit on the questions they asked.
Why wouldn’t I just use Craigslist? It would take me relatively the same amount of time and would produce the same results (well less expensive results). What I don’t like about hiring someone off of Craigslist is that you never know who you’ll end up with. Are they insured and bonded? Do they have references? This is work I have to do when shopping for people on Craigslist. If Bidmycleaning.com did this for me, I would be willing to pay a small premium in price.
Carlie-
The distinction of this site versus Craigslist is that you do not have to contact your selected provider only to get a voicemail and hope for a timely response and repeat the process three times until you get what you need. This is immediate selection, immediate booking, time saving no haggle shopping. In addition, this site is 100% dedicated to the cleaning industry providing value added information, account management, tracking of vendors that you have used in the past, what they charged, their ratings etc…not quite Craigslist.
You may also view upcoming scheduled appointments, add or change appointments and switch providers all without having to make one phone call or send one email. However, I do think that the pricing is something that we must take a serious look at. Thank you so much for taking the time to let us know what you think Carlie! People like you are going to be the one of the keys to our success. Many thanks again.
There seems to be a large appetite for online brokerage like this. Kicked off by travelocity.com for airline tickets, you can now use this type of service for baby sitters (sittercity.com) and moving freight (freightquote.com). So much for the promised disintermediation of the web!