Name: Housekeep
Based: London
Website: housekeep.com
The UK home cleaning market is very fragmented, with 90% of work carried out by individual cleaners. These individual cleaners struggle to showcase themselves and customers struggle to find trust, reliability and quality cleaning. In this fragmented market, we knew we would need to be lean and flexible to succeed, using technology wherever possible.
For customers, we’ve made it easy to book, manage and pay their cleaner. You can book and pay online, plus you can log in to your account to organise future cleans, request extra services, track your spare keys and rate past visits.
We want to find the very best cleaners out there, so it’s been important to make Housekeep attractive for them too. Historically, cleaners had jobs in wide areas meaning lots of travel time and cost. We changed that by allowing cleaners to choose a dedicated local area, meaning less travel, more working hours and higher earnings. Each cleaner manages their work through a phone app, which shows all their jobs and any special instructions. Housekeep acts like a marketing agency for the best cleaners.
We’ve grown a lot in the last few months, so working smarter at head office has been important too. We use cloud-based, flexible productivity tools like Xero, Basecamp and Evernote, plus have automated payments through Stripe. Any time we find ourselves doing a task on repeat, we try to automate it.
Rachel Wastell is marketing manager at Housekeep
