<story><title>What I learned about online-to-offline</title><url>http://justinkan.com/exec-errands-post-mortem</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>_sentient</author><text>Great points. As someone who has founded a couple tech-meets-meatspace businesses (including a cleaning company) these observations certainly ring true.&lt;p&gt;Another thing I would add, is that people often don&amp;#x27;t correctly estimate how much of a pain it can be to deal with customer&amp;#x2F;worker issues day in and day out. Most tech companies have limited support access, which greatly reduces their exposure to angry clients.&lt;p&gt;But when you&amp;#x27;re in a services business you are pretty much forced to spend hours each day talking with angry customers, unreliable providers, and helping resolve seemingly endless conflicts. You can mitigate some of this with better systems and tech, but ultimately this burden only increases as you scale. At the end of the day there will always be a subset of your customers who are belligerent, unreasonable, or trying to con you outright. And that&amp;#x27;s to say nothing of unreliable&amp;#x2F;dishonest workers.&lt;p&gt;It can be a great business to be in, but you will need a thick skin, velvet tongue, and something of an indomitable spirit.</text></comment>
<story><title>What I learned about online-to-offline</title><url>http://justinkan.com/exec-errands-post-mortem</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>alaskamiller</author><text>1. Good help is hard to find. If you&amp;#x27;re smart and capable, you&amp;#x27;re above that $20&amp;#x2F;hr line, and if you&amp;#x27;re not... well you&amp;#x27;re just not.&lt;p&gt;2. Service business is hard. Customer support can eat up your time, money, and energy day in, day out. Maybe if one had worked in retail in their youth they would understand it.&lt;p&gt;3. One of the more homegrown trends the past few years has been maid service. There&amp;#x27;s a vibrant community on Reddit and blogospheres revolving around setting up maid services in various localities. They all build off the same model. Good to see that it&amp;#x27;s validated by Exec switching to focusing on that.&lt;p&gt;In the end, these businesses revolving around re-organizing labor structures and managing people result in the inevitable grand truth: people are complex creatures, sometimes a person is good, sometimes a person is bad, then sometimes a person is cheap, and sometimes a person is expensive.&lt;p&gt;But we keep insisting on using an iPhone app to sort human beings into quantifiable skillsets then driving down the costs to utilize them. Everyone serves as little cogs in our lives commanded by our remote control. So future.</text></comment>