Gig Economy

MANOR

MANOR, an on-demand servicing marketplace, was designed to revolutionize the residential and commercial cleaning industry through comprehensive software solutions that streamlined operations and reimagined the customer experience - with a mobile app that empowered clients to schedule and manage multiple bookings, make payments, and interact with service providers effortlessly.‍

My Role: Founder | Product Manger
Duration: January 2015 - March 2020

Platform: iOS and Web App

Tools: Sketch, Basecamp, Trello, Invision, HubSpot, Excel, Slack, Google Analytics, Optimizely, Hotjar, Mixpanel, iMovie, Keynote, Survey Monkey, Mailchimp, WordPress, Git, Github, Jira

Check out some demos

About the project

This project highlights MANOR, a mobile app for booking and managing house cleanings. I detail my startup's mission—from the discovery phase to launch—to give professionals quality, hassle free access to cleaning services and to empower servicers to be entrepreneurial. The project includes screenshots and artifacts from the platform’s dashboard, mobile application, scheduling interface, and payment processing system.

Origin Story

In the realm of app development, maximizing impact is not just a goal, but a necessity. MANOR is a prime example of leveraging technology to make a difference. Let's delve into this case study to understand the key elements that contributed to it’s success.

The inspiration for MANOR was born out of a simple act, helping a friend. I was just starting business school when a friend sought my guidance operating his cleaning company. I quickly discovered a myriad of pain points that left him struggling to manage his operations and to provide the quality of service he took pride in delivering. The cleaning industry, though vast and in constant demand, was largely fragmented—more than 85% of the market had not yet been touched by the transformative power of technology. Business owners juggled chaotic workflows, manual processes, and limited visibility into their operations. I saw an opportunity to bring order and efficiency to this disorganized space.

MANOR, a dual-sided marketplace, was designed to provide a much simpler, efficient, and valuable home servicing experience for both providers and consumers. On one side, an easy to use mobile experience for users to book, coordinate, and manage requested services. On the other side of the platform, MANOR empowered independent cleaners and professional cleaning services to find work and manage operations seamlessly. By bridging the gap between these two audiences, MANOR offered a powerful solution that redefined how cleaning businesses operated. MANOR grew to a team of 18, +5,000 (MAUs), more than 1,000 operators, and launched in Colorado, Illinois, and Iowa.

🏁 How I started

The Problem

Requesting home services was outdated, cumbersome, inefficient, and annoying for everyone.

Discovery

With my vision formulating, I started by understanding the competitive landscape and mapping out a business model canvas. Below is the very first version of the canvas and I’m feeling all types of nostalgia seeing it right now. I jotted down basic thoughts, hypotheses, that I would continuously test and iterate on as I gained new insights from interviews.

Fueled by curiosity and driven by a lean methodology, I dove deep into the industry. I engaged in hundreds of conversations with users of cleaning services as well as cleaning service providers, gathering insights into their pain points and common frustrations.

Armed with this data, I sent out surveys to validate emerging patterns and tested early ideas through Google ads and landing pages, refining the concept with every iteration. As the picture became clearer, I sketched wireframes and built user experience prototypes to gather real-world feedback, focusing on creating solutions that would resonate with both service providers and their clients.

The Solution

Utilize new technologies to provide much simpler, efficient, and valuable home servicing experiences for both servicers and customers.

MVP & Go-To-Market

Leveraging my advisory team—which included developers from Facebook and Apple, as well as a computer science professor at Stanford—I was able to source an exceptional team of developers. I implemented agile methodologies using two-week sprints and conducted beta testing for both residential and commercial experiences. This testing involved a cohort of operators (cleaners) and users during the discovery process, as well as 10 real estate agents.

The images below showcase the initial designs for both the mobile app interface and the operator portal interface.

Growth

By end of first year we had over 350 active operators and over 5000 unique users request a cleaning. Growth strategy centered around in-bound marketing with a goal to drive qualified traffic and to improved our Google rank by identifying keywords and creating content.

Growth Process