Adora Chung, founder of HomeJoy, discusses the journey of her startup. Starting with only $100 in revenues and lots of credit card debt, HomeJoy has now grown to over 30 markets, with over 100 employees and $40 million in venture capital raised. Adora shares the struggles and failures they faced along the way, including several unsuccessful ideas and a desperate attempt to create an entertainment site for gossip news. The turning point came when Adora's brother hired a cleaner, leading them to create HomeJoy as a platform connecting people with home service professionals.

- The speaker and his partner wanted to solve the problem of finding reliable and affordable cleaners.
- They split the responsibilities, with the speaker focusing on engineering and operations, while his partner focused on customer service and user acquisition.
- They initially became cleaners themselves to solve the chicken and egg problem of a marketplace.
- The speaker got a job at a cleaning company to learn about the industry and discovered its inefficiencies.
- They eventually raised money from investors and expanded their platform to multiple markets across America.
- The speaker describes the journey as a challenging marathon with unexpected obstacles, but believes in the impact of their work.

- The speaker acknowledges that they and the audience are passionate and dedicated to building something impactful
- They thank the audience for listening to their stories
- They hope the audience takes something away from the day
- The speaker looks forward to hearing the audience's stories in the future
- They wish the audience good luck.

- Adora Chung, founder of HomeJoy, shares the journey of her startup, which started with only $100 in revenues and lots of credit card debt.
- HomeJoy has now grown to over 30 markets, with over 100 employees and $40 million in venture capital raised.
- Adora discusses the struggles and failures they faced, including unsuccessful ideas and a failed attempt at creating an entertainment site.
- The turning point came when Adora's brother hired a cleaner, leading them to create HomeJoy as a platform connecting people with home service professionals.
- Adora thanks the audience for listening, hopes they take something away from the day, and looks forward to hearing their stories in the future.

Adora Cheung, cofounder of Homejoy, at Female Founders Conference 2014

So with that, I'm going to introduce Adora Chung, who is the founder of HomeJoy.

And I've heard her story, and it is amazing.

She was part of the summer 2010 batch, and she had many years of, like, pain before she got where she is today.

And my cofounder is actually my little brother, Aaron.

So for those of you who don't know, Homejoy is essentially a platform that connects people with home service professionals, and we started with cleaning professionals.

And the story of Homejoy is, if you read it, a lot of you are in tech and you read about, you know, startups in the press and whatnot.

And so, kind of the story you get from that is, we were, we've been like, we came out of nowhere essentially in the past year.

Which is partially true, A year ago, about 14 months ago, we were sitting in Mountain View in our apartment still working on what Homejoy is today.

And we were getting about $100 in revenues in a month.

And fast forward to today, we're in over 30 markets, our platform's in over 30 markets.

We have over 100 employees working for Homejoy.

We have 2 offices here in San Francisco and New York City.

We have over 1,000 cleaning professionals on our platform.

Our revenues are, our monthly revenues are well over in the millions and we've recently raised over, we've raised close to $40 million in venture capital and we continue to grow month over month.

We continue to grow double digits month over month.

So what today I don't want to really talk about homejoy per se or the startup per se but more so the journey that it that we took to get to where we are today.

So the way I like to talk about homejoy, it's sort of in 2 periods.

There's the first 1,000 days, which I like to call the dark ages, And then the second period, which is kind of what I described, is this ramp up into what we are today.

So the first, you know, to start where Homejoy to explain where Homejoy started, you have to rewind back 5 years ago.

Around 2009, That's when I quit my job at a startup called Slide.

And Aaron and I started working together on various ideas.

And sort of like, you know, people describe startups as there's lots of ups and downs.

But really for us, there were no ups during this period.

There was just like a bunch of it was just like a graph If you had a graph of like confidence level and money that you had in the bank, it was just like going downwards into the abyss.

And so sort of, you know, there are many stories you can tell, and I will say like we went through 13 ideas, pivoted it through a bunch of these fully fleshed out, built out ideas.

But I will describe, I don't have time to describe all of them, but I'll describe 2 or 3 of them.

And it kind of represents the buckets I would put the rest of them in.

So in 2009, we started on this thing called Pathjoy.

It was a platform that connected people with life coaches and therapists online.

But over a course of 3 or 4 months, we couldn't get many customers in the door.

And so I sat there and thought, okay, well, maybe I should just use this myself.

Which is, you know, should be a learn ball right away.

It's like, why didn't you use it in the first place?

And then I sat there through a couple of sessions, and I thought to myself, god, this is the dumbest thing I have ever been through.

I was trying to create a solution for a problem that I didn't really have.

And so Aaron and I decided to just go to another idea.

So the second idea we had, and this was midway point through our stay in YC in 2010, was this idea of creating a platform for experts to write content.

We were very good at determining SEO keywords that would drive traffic to our site.

And so we thought of this grand plan of just getting experts to write on those keywords.

We didn't have to pay for any of the content.

And it was just like demand media, which at that time was going through an IPO.

And so it was going well, you know, it was growing slowly, slowly over time.

And then at the end of YC, we had to go pitch the idea to investors.

And literally, in 1 of the meetings I was in, it was with an angel investor.

I was telling him all the great things that were going to change the world with this content site thingy.

And he literally, after I go through the whole spiel, he looks at me and says, Adora, I think that's the most soul-sucking idea I've ever heard of.

And I was like, no, no, no, don't worry about it.

But then 3 or 4 months later, you know, long and behold, the users kept coming, coming, coming, but really I looked at Aaron, my co-founder, and said, Aaron, I think this is the most soul-sucking thing I've ever done.

And so that was the second problem we ran into, Which is don't work on soul-sucking ideas.

So we kept going, going, went through many other ideas, and I'll tell you the third idea because I'm going to run out of time before I even get to the crazy story.

But the third idea I do want to talk about is how many people here are engineers or programmers?

So I got obsessed with this product called Quora.

And Quora, which is a Q&A thing, and I wasn't obsessed with it for the Q&A part per se.

I was obsessed with it because of the technology behind it.

And so I got really sucked into trying to replicate that myself.

And so I built out this framework over the course of the month, just trying to duplicate it.

And he looks at me and says, OK, what are you going to do with it?

I'm just going to put Q&A on it, too, and then I'm going to make users pay for it.

And that's how I'm going to make it into a business.

If you Google task and, like, my name or something, it will show up as a couple articles.

Like, the first day on launch day, it was like 5 users.

So I stepped back a little and I said, okay, what did I do?

I built something cool and I built a solution before I actually had a problem to solve.

And so that is something that, you know, a lesson that I learned that I would not do again.

So anyway, like I said, we went through about 10, a dozen of these sort of path-baked ideas.

We were very good at executing, but at the end of the day, they say that an idea is just like a needle in a haystack.

So if you grabbed a bunch of hay and you're just executing around that idea, you're not going to get very far until you find that needle.

And around 2012, we were essentially out of money, kind of, you know, I had done the cliche entrepreneurial thing, which is, you know, get a credit card.

And I'm like thinking, well, a third 1, I'm probably not even going to get, it's just going downhill from here.

But we were at that point working on the worst idea we've ever thought of, which was essentially an entertainment site for gossip news type of stuff.

And so here I am, like, I'm a programmer myself, but instead of programming, I'm actually rewriting gossip news onto the site to drive traffic to it so that we could make money on the ads.

So you can see our desperation at this point.

So we were working in my brother's apartment.

And him being a typical bachelor, it was a complete mess.

And to the point where his bathroom, I refused to go in the bathroom.

I would literally, we were by the, if you know the South Bay or the Mountain View area, his apartment was by the Caltrain, by the Caster Street.

So I would literally get outside, even if it was raining, just walk out, go down to Caster Street, buy a sandwich so I didn't feel bad for using the restroom.

So anyway, he decides to finally go and get his place clean.

And because we were just working away, he decided the quickest way to do this is just to find a cleaner.

He was trying to save time, but what took him, you know, what was supposed to save him time took him an inordinately long amount of time.

Basically he went to first the national agencies or the Mary Maids and Molly Maids of the world.

And there you have to pay anywhere from $40 to $50 an hour.

The good thing about them is you know the person that shows up is going to background check, knows how to clean and all these great things.

We didn't have to get another credit card just to pay for the cleaning.

You could find someone to clean for about $15 to $20 an hour, but you didn't know who the hell was going to actually show up.

And so he comes to me and says, hey, I think there's actually a problem here that I am having.

And so me, I'm sitting there writing TMZ.com and trying to write those newsletters.

So we want to do more research into cleaning itself.

I would take the engineering, I would build the site, and I would do the operational, getting the cleaners on board, and he would do the customer service and do user acquisition.

He's an absolute genius on the user acquisition growth stuff.

And then I kind of was sitting there, had nothing else better to do because we had no customers.

And so we decided, when you have a marketplace, you always have this chicken and egg problem.

And we decided we could solve 1 side of the problem by just becoming cleaners ourselves.

And so Aaron, Aaron decided, so Aaron was able to have a couple, was able to get a couple of customers into the door.

And what we found was we were really bad at cleaning.

I mean, we should have known this by his messy apartment.

So he and I decided we had to go learn how to clean.

We have to really understand this industry at its very core, its very foundation.

So the first thing we thought of was, oh, let's just buy some books.

And there's no books for professional cleaning, but there are books by some lady named Martha Stewart who you can read.

So the second idea we had was, okay, 1 of us should just get a job at a cleaning company.

So me being, you know, the engineer on this project, there was nothing else to engineer past the booking part of the site.

And so what I did was I applied to hundreds and hundreds of cleaning jobs.

Didn't get for 2 weeks, 2, maybe even 3 weeks.

And then suddenly 1 day, I get a call from a cleaning company in San Francisco.

So keep in mind we're in Mountain View and I have to go to San Francisco for this job.

So I go interview, you know, actually the interview is kind of funny itself.

Basically I have to do the background check, the drug testing, all these things and kind of like make up some stories about why I had a college degree and I needed you know to clean.

But at the end of the day I got the job and I was very proud it's like my proudest moment which is you know whatever.

But you know I I decided okay I'm gonna do this I'm gonna learn how to clean I'm gonna learn about the business like how does the old old guard do it?

And so I would get up every day at, well, the first couple days I got up at like 6 o'clock, went to San Francisco, we started our jobs around 7 o'clock and just kind of learned the business.

And then what I learned there was actually quite amazing.

And it's actually very hard to train someone who doesn't know how to clean.

But 2 is the business itself is run very inefficiently.

And so basically what happens is that the way that they do things, for example, scheduling jobs, They would sit there on an Excel sheet and have all the cleaner schedules and try to optimize, optimize, optimize manually.

When in my mind I'm thinking, if I just put this through a program, I could save you 50% to 75% like utilize, save you cost 50% to 75% of it.

Down to like customers were booking through or were just calling in and trying to book versus, you know, it's the 21st century.

So these kind of things I just learned over time and I really understood what the inefficiencies are.

Anyway, so long story short, I was there for a while.

Basically what happened was I didn't stay too long because it got very exhausting.

I would basically go What I had to do was because there was traffic, you know, from Mountain View to San Francisco, I don't know if anyone has driven that traffic before, but it takes sometimes an hour to an hour and a half.

And so to save time, and I still had to work on the site, I would start work at 8 o'clock or 7 o'clock to 8 o'clock, work until 5 p.m., clean, clean, clean, clean, run around the city cleaning, trying to avoid people because there are people I recognize and I was like, oh, I'm cleaning your office, cool.

And then I would drive back down to Mountain View to work on the site, code, code, code, code, code.

And then to save time, I would actually get in the car around 2 or 3 o'clock, drive back up to San Francisco and sleep in my car so I could avoid the rush hour traffic in the morning.

Then I would hop out my car at 630, go to McDonald's, brush my teeth, and then go clean, clean, clean, and I did this for a little bit.

So that is the crazy, crazy, jinx stuff I was doing back then.

Which was, I didn't recently, I actually never really told that story until recently because it was so embarrassing.

But at the same time, now that we're doing okay, I feel okay to tell the story.

So anyway, OK, I'm running out of time here.

So we when I quit the job, the cleaning job, we were growing very, very fast.

We're like, oh, my goodness, we have a problem that we wanted to solve.

And it's, you know, needed in Mountain View anyway.

So we decided we need to expand and expand into the San Francisco area.

But we ran into a really big problem, which is money.

And so we actually decided, okay, we need to actually convince investors, who for the past 3 years kind of just ignored us because we were doing all these stupid other things.

And so we had to convince them to put money into something where, you know, involved cleaning.

And so but anyway, long story short, we were able to raise $50,000, which doesn't, you know, sounds a little, but to us it was like a bajillion bajillion dollars back then because we had nothing but it was enough to take us to the to take us for a few months so that we can expand into San Francisco.

And that's where it really, really took off.

And then at that point, we were able to convince investors, even more investors, to give us a seed round of, I think, it was like close to $2 million.

And at that point in January, we decided 1 key thing, which is we had worked so long and hard to come up with an idea that actually worked that we wanted to prove that this was the idea we should be working on full time for the next 10, 20, 50, 100 years.

We didn't want to take too long to figure out if this was, you know, an idea that would grow.

So we decided, okay, we're going to launch this thing into as many markets across America as we can to prove that this is something that didn't just speak to Silicon Valley.

We weren't just another tech startup that just spoke to techies and early adopters, but that it spoke to the rest of America.

So in January of 2013, we were able to, with our seed money, able to hire a bunch of great, awesome operators who helped us launch our platform in over 30 markets within 6 or 7 months.

And what we found was the growth rates of all our markets were kind of trending the same way.

So in San Francisco, it was going like this, same slopes for New York City, Chicago, Baltimore, Houston, whatever.

And we were very confident at that point that we had something good.

And so that's when we were able to go to VCs and say, hey, listen, this is a very huge market.

We have proven it, we have expanded, we have the team to do it, and so please give us money so we can go even further.

And so they did give us money eventually.

So that's so I'm going to conclude here since she's telling me to go off the stage.

So this journey has been kind of really crazy.

There's this phrase which is a gross underestimation of what this is, which is it's not a sprint, but a marathon.

And by underestimation, I mean it's like you're sprinting a marathon.

And there are hills and there are mountains along the way that you didn't really expect, there are rainstorms, there's avalanches along the way, there's, you know, those water stations that you see from afar As you get closer to them, they're actually just mirages.

And, you know, like, and the finish line just keeps going further and further and further away.

But the good news is that you and I are here because we're just a little bit nuts enough to think that, you know, to have that, to be passionate about and to love and to want to deal with all the nuances of building something that's big and impactful.

So thank you for listening to my stories.

And hopefully, you guys take something away from this whole entire day, and I hope to listen to your great stories next year or the following years.


Speaker 0: So with that, I'm going to introduce Adora Chung, who is the founder of HomeJoy. And I've heard her story, and it is amazing. She was part of the summer 2010 batch, and she had many years of, like, pain before she got where she is today. So welcome Adora. Hello?

Test?

Speaker 1: Hi everyone, How's everyone doing? So like Jessica said, my name is Adora. I am 1 of the cofounders of Homejoy. And my cofounder is actually my little brother, Aaron. Aw.

Yeah. So for those of you who don't know, Homejoy is essentially a platform that connects people with home service professionals, and we started with cleaning professionals. And the story of Homejoy is, if you read it, a lot of you are in tech and you read about, you know, startups in the press and whatnot. And so, kind of the story you get from that is, we were, we've been like, we came out of nowhere essentially in the past year. Which is partially true, A year ago, about 14 months ago, we were sitting in Mountain View in our apartment still working on what Homejoy is today.

It was just me and Aaron. We had no employees. We had lots of credit card debt. And we were getting about $100 in revenues in a month. And fast forward to today, we're in over 30 markets, our platform's in over 30 markets.

We have over 100 employees working for Homejoy. We have 2 offices here in San Francisco and New York City. We have over 1,000 cleaning professionals on our platform. Our revenues are, our monthly revenues are well over in the millions and we've recently raised over, we've raised close to $40 million in venture capital and we continue to grow month over month. Thank you.

We continue to grow double digits month over month. So what today I don't want to really talk about homejoy per se or the startup per se but more so the journey that it that we took to get to where we are today. So the way I like to talk about homejoy, it's sort of in 2 periods. There's the first 1,000 days, which I like to call the dark ages, And then the second period, which is kind of what I described, is this ramp up into what we are today. So the first, you know, to start where Homejoy to explain where Homejoy started, you have to rewind back 5 years ago.

Around 2009, That's when I quit my job at a startup called Slide. And Aaron and I started working together on various ideas. And sort of like, you know, people describe startups as there's lots of ups and downs. But really for us, there were no ups during this period. There was just like a bunch of it was just like a graph If you had a graph of like confidence level and money that you had in the bank, it was just like going downwards into the abyss.

And so sort of, you know, there are many stories you can tell, and I will say like we went through 13 ideas, pivoted it through a bunch of these fully fleshed out, built out ideas. But I will describe, I don't have time to describe all of them, but I'll describe 2 or 3 of them. And it kind of represents the buckets I would put the rest of them in. So in 2009, we started on this thing called Pathjoy. It was a platform that connected people with life coaches and therapists online.

And it sounds like a grand idea. It sounds like a good idea, right? We got into YC with it. So of course it's an awesome idea. But over a course of 3 or 4 months, we couldn't get many customers in the door.

And so I sat there and thought, okay, well, maybe I should just use this myself. Which is, you know, should be a learn ball right away. It's like, why didn't you use it in the first place? So I started using our own product. And then I sat there through a couple of sessions, and I thought to myself, god, this is the dumbest thing I have ever been through.

I don't need a life coach. I don't need a therapist. So herein lied a problem. I was trying to create a solution for a problem that I didn't really have. And so Aaron and I decided to just go to another idea.

So the second idea we had, and this was midway point through our stay in YC in 2010, was this idea of creating a platform for experts to write content. We were very good at determining SEO keywords that would drive traffic to our site. And so we thought of this grand plan of just getting experts to write on those keywords. We didn't have to pay for any of the content. And it was just like demand media, which at that time was going through an IPO.

So it was like a no-cost demand media. And so it was going well, you know, it was growing slowly, slowly over time. And then at the end of YC, we had to go pitch the idea to investors. And literally, in 1 of the meetings I was in, it was with an angel investor. And I sat across from him.

I was telling him all the great things that were going to change the world with this content site thingy. And he literally, after I go through the whole spiel, he looks at me and says, Adora, I think that's the most soul-sucking idea I've ever heard of. And I was like, no, no, no, don't worry about it. It's growing. It's going to be huge.

Don't worry about it. He didn't give me any money. But then 3 or 4 months later, you know, long and behold, the users kept coming, coming, coming, but really I looked at Aaron, my co-founder, and said, Aaron, I think this is the most soul-sucking thing I've ever done. And so that was the second problem we ran into, Which is don't work on soul-sucking ideas. So we kept going, going, went through many other ideas, and I'll tell you the third idea because I'm going to run out of time before I even get to the crazy story.

But the third idea I do want to talk about is how many people here are engineers or programmers? Oh, crap. A lot. Great. Yay!

So I got obsessed with this product called Quora. And Quora, which is a Q&A thing, and I wasn't obsessed with it for the Q&A part per se. I was obsessed with it because of the technology behind it. It was like a real-time framework. And so I got really sucked into trying to replicate that myself.

And so I built out this framework over the course of the month, just trying to duplicate it. And I go to Aaron, I say, look at this. Look what I've built. Isn't it awesome? And he looks at me and says, OK, what are you going to do with it?

I say, no, don't worry about it. I'm just going to put Q&A on it, too, and then I'm going to make users pay for it. And that's how I'm going to make it into a business. And so he's like, okay, whatever. Let's just try it.

So we tried it. We actually launched it. If you Google task and, like, my name or something, it will show up as a couple articles. But long behold, again, no users came. Like, the first day on launch day, it was like 5 users.

Next day, 2 users. Next day, 00000. So got the point. So I stepped back a little and I said, okay, what did I do? I built something cool and I built a solution before I actually had a problem to solve.

And so that is something that, you know, a lesson that I learned that I would not do again. So anyway, like I said, we went through about 10, a dozen of these sort of path-baked ideas. We were very good at executing, but at the end of the day, they say that an idea is just like a needle in a haystack. So if you grabbed a bunch of hay and you're just executing around that idea, you're not going to get very far until you find that needle. So we kept going, kept going.

And around 2012, we were essentially out of money, kind of, you know, I had done the cliche entrepreneurial thing, which is, you know, get a credit card. So I got 1 credit card, it was $5,000. Got another 1, it was $500. And I'm like thinking, well, a third 1, I'm probably not even going to get, it's just going downhill from here. But we were at that point working on the worst idea we've ever thought of, which was essentially an entertainment site for gossip news type of stuff.

And so here I am, like, I'm a programmer myself, but instead of programming, I'm actually rewriting gossip news onto the site to drive traffic to it so that we could make money on the ads. So you can see our desperation at this point. So we were working in my brother's apartment. And him being a typical bachelor, it was a complete mess. And to the point where his bathroom, I refused to go in the bathroom.

I would literally, we were by the, if you know the South Bay or the Mountain View area, his apartment was by the Caltrain, by the Caster Street. So I would literally get outside, even if it was raining, just walk out, go down to Caster Street, buy a sandwich so I didn't feel bad for using the restroom. So anyway, he decides to finally go and get his place clean. And because we were just working away, he decided the quickest way to do this is just to find a cleaner. And so that's what he did.

So he ran into 2 problems. He was trying to save time, but what took him, you know, what was supposed to save him time took him an inordinately long amount of time. Basically he went to first the national agencies or the Mary Maids and Molly Maids of the world. And there you have to pay anywhere from $40 to $50 an hour. The good thing about them is you know the person that shows up is going to background check, knows how to clean and all these great things.

But it was just too much for us. We didn't have to get another credit card just to pay for the cleaning. And the second 1 was Craigslist, right? You could find someone to clean for about $15 to $20 an hour, but you didn't know who the hell was going to actually show up. And so that wasn't really a good option.

And so he comes to me and says, hey, I think there's actually a problem here that I am having. Would you like to work on it? And so me, I'm sitting there writing TMZ.com and trying to write those newsletters. Yeah, of course not. Of course.

So we want to do more research into cleaning itself. So we split up the duties, basically. I would take the engineering, I would build the site, and I would do the operational, getting the cleaners on board, and he would do the customer service and do user acquisition. He's an absolute genius on the user acquisition growth stuff. So that's what we did.

So over a weekend, I built the site. And then I kind of was sitting there, had nothing else better to do because we had no customers. And so we decided, when you have a marketplace, you always have this chicken and egg problem. And we decided we could solve 1 side of the problem by just becoming cleaners ourselves. And so Aaron, Aaron decided, so Aaron was able to have a couple, was able to get a couple of customers into the door.

And we went to go clean. And what we found was we were really bad at cleaning. I mean, we should have known this by his messy apartment. So he and I decided we had to go learn how to clean. We have to really understand this industry at its very core, its very foundation.

So the first thing we thought of was, oh, let's just buy some books. Go on Amazon.com, buy some books. And there's no books for professional cleaning, but there are books by some lady named Martha Stewart who you can read. And so that didn't really help. So the second idea we had was, okay, 1 of us should just get a job at a cleaning company.

And that's what we set out to do. So me being, you know, the engineer on this project, there was nothing else to engineer past the booking part of the site. I was tasked to go do this. And so what I did was I applied to hundreds and hundreds of cleaning jobs. Didn't get for 2 weeks, 2, maybe even 3 weeks.

Everyone rejected my application. And then suddenly 1 day, I get a call from a cleaning company in San Francisco. So keep in mind we're in Mountain View and I have to go to San Francisco for this job. So I go interview, you know, actually the interview is kind of funny itself. Basically I have to do the background check, the drug testing, all these things and kind of like make up some stories about why I had a college degree and I needed you know to clean.

But at the end of the day I got the job and I was very proud it's like my proudest moment which is you know whatever. But you know I I decided okay I'm gonna do this I'm gonna learn how to clean I'm gonna learn about the business like how does the old old guard do it? And so I would get up every day at, well, the first couple days I got up at like 6 o'clock, went to San Francisco, we started our jobs around 7 o'clock and just kind of learned the business. Or, sorry, learned how to clean. And then what I learned there was actually quite amazing.

1 is, you know, again, cleaning is hard. And it's actually very hard to train someone who doesn't know how to clean. But 2 is the business itself is run very inefficiently. And so basically what happens is that the way that they do things, for example, scheduling jobs, They would sit there on an Excel sheet and have all the cleaner schedules and try to optimize, optimize, optimize manually. When in my mind I'm thinking, if I just put this through a program, I could save you 50% to 75% like utilize, save you cost 50% to 75% of it.

Down to like customers were booking through or were just calling in and trying to book versus, you know, it's the 21st century. Why can't you just book online? So these kind of things I just learned over time and I really understood what the inefficiencies are. Anyway, so long story short, I was there for a while. Basically what happened was I didn't stay too long because it got very exhausting.

I would basically go What I had to do was because there was traffic, you know, from Mountain View to San Francisco, I don't know if anyone has driven that traffic before, but it takes sometimes an hour to an hour and a half. And so to save time, and I still had to work on the site, I would start work at 8 o'clock or 7 o'clock to 8 o'clock, work until 5 p.m., clean, clean, clean, clean, run around the city cleaning, trying to avoid people because there are people I recognize and I was like, oh, I'm cleaning your office, cool. And then I would drive back down to Mountain View to work on the site, code, code, code, code, code. And then to save time, I would actually get in the car around 2 or 3 o'clock, drive back up to San Francisco and sleep in my car so I could avoid the rush hour traffic in the morning. Then I would hop out my car at 630, go to McDonald's, brush my teeth, and then go clean, clean, clean, and I did this for a little bit.

So anyway, that is my... So that is the crazy, crazy, jinx stuff I was doing back then. Which was, I didn't recently, I actually never really told that story until recently because it was so embarrassing. But at the same time, now that we're doing okay, I feel okay to tell the story. So anyway, OK, I'm running out of time here.

So we when I quit the job, the cleaning job, we were growing very, very fast. And it was awesome. We're like, oh, my goodness, we have a problem that we wanted to solve. And it's, you know, needed in Mountain View anyway. So we decided we need to expand and expand into the San Francisco area.

But we ran into a really big problem, which is money. We had no money to go anywhere. We were in debt. And so we actually decided, okay, we need to actually convince investors, who for the past 3 years kind of just ignored us because we were doing all these stupid other things. And so we had to convince them to put money into something where, you know, involved cleaning.

And so but anyway, long story short, we were able to raise $50,000, which doesn't, you know, sounds a little, but to us it was like a bajillion bajillion dollars back then because we had nothing but it was enough to take us to the to take us for a few months so that we can expand into San Francisco. And that's where it really, really took off. And then at that point, we were able to convince investors, even more investors, to give us a seed round of, I think, it was like close to $2 million. And at that point in January, we decided 1 key thing, which is we had worked so long and hard to come up with an idea that actually worked that we wanted to prove that this was the idea we should be working on full time for the next 10, 20, 50, 100 years. We didn't want to take too long to figure out if this was, you know, an idea that would grow.

So we decided, okay, we're going to launch this thing into as many markets across America as we can to prove that this is something that didn't just speak to Silicon Valley. We weren't just another tech startup that just spoke to techies and early adopters, but that it spoke to the rest of America. So in January of 2013, we were able to, with our seed money, able to hire a bunch of great, awesome operators who helped us launch our platform in over 30 markets within 6 or 7 months. And what we found was the growth rates of all our markets were kind of trending the same way. So in San Francisco, it was going like this, same slopes for New York City, Chicago, Baltimore, Houston, whatever.

And we were very confident at that point that we had something good. And so that's when we were able to go to VCs and say, hey, listen, this is a very huge market. We have proven it, we have expanded, we have the team to do it, and so please give us money so we can go even further. And so they did give us money eventually. So that's so I'm going to conclude here since she's telling me to go off the stage.

So this journey has been kind of really crazy. There's this phrase which is a gross underestimation of what this is, which is it's not a sprint, but a marathon. And by underestimation, I mean it's like you're sprinting a marathon. And there are hills and there are mountains along the way that you didn't really expect, there are rainstorms, there's avalanches along the way, there's, you know, those water stations that you see from afar As you get closer to them, they're actually just mirages. And, you know, like, and the finish line just keeps going further and further and further away.

Like, there is no finish line, really. So it's pretty brutal, right? But the good news is that you and I are here because we're just a little bit nuts enough to think that, you know, to have that, to be passionate about and to love and to want to deal with all the nuances of building something that's big and impactful. So thank you for listening to my stories. And hopefully, you guys take something away from this whole entire day, and I hope to listen to your great stories next year or the following years.

Good luck.

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Adora Cheung at Female Founders Conference 2014