Homejoy Mysteriously Relaunches as Fly Maids, purchaser Confusion Ensues

Homejoy, the cleansing carrier that shuttered back in July, is making a comeback below the moniker “Fly Maids”—and has a plagiarized site as well.

In a Medium submit printed Wednesday, a former Homejoy user wrote that he received an email from the now-defunct company, which invited him to make use of Homejoy’s new partner service, Fly Maids. Upon taking a look at the Fly Maids website online, he found that every one of his Homejoy account data—house deal with, electronic mail, and credit card quantity—had been transferred over to Fly Maids, whose web page gave the impression to be a blatant imitation of the website for handy, Homejoy’s greatest competitor.

turns out Fly Maids is Homejoy cofounder Aaron Cheung’s attempt to take any other stab at his failed startup. consistent with a comment Cheung made on aggregator site Hacker information, Fly Maids received Homejoy’s area and consumer knowledge. “after we contacted clients, we didn’t inform them we were Homejoy relaunching because we wished to gauge reception to our new edition with out the affect of Homejoy’s model,” Cheung wrote. “because of this, we scared many shoppers, who expected the worst had came about to their knowledge. We will have to have told clients upfront who we have been, what we had been testing, and used original content.”

Cheung delivered that, as of Wednesday, Fly Maids had deleted all the bank card data it bought through Homejoy (none of which had been used, he says), and that the corporate’s Stripe account had been closed. The Fly Maids website online has also been suspended quickly, though Cheung didn’t right away deal with why it so closely resembled to hand’s.

nonetheless, this brings up the query of what firms should do with consumer data in the event that they go beneath. The onus should be on the corporate to both eliminate the info, or store it securely—and transparently—if the plan is to relaunch underneath any other title. When Homejoy closed its doors in July, Google straight away swooped in and supposedly employed about 20 contributors of its tech workforce. it can be uncertain how many Homejoy workers are following Cheung to Fly Maids.

Homejoy, which was founded by Cheung and his sister Adora in 2010, noted a scarcity of funding and the pressure of mounting worker classification proceedings when it introduced that it was shutting down. however a deep dive into the corporate’s troubles, printed to Medium earlier this week, says various former workers claimed Homejoy was once going through a large number of issues, together with “mounting losses, poor purchaser retention, a expensive global enlargement, run-of-the-mill execution problems, technical system faults and the steady leak of its easiest employees to direct employment arrangements with its own (now former) shoppers.”