Marcela Sapone
CEO & Co-founder at HelloAlfred
Discussion
M
Marcela
@mssapone
Hi - I'm Marcela Sapone, Co-Founder & CEO of Hello Alfred. Since winning TechCrunch Disrupt SF we've been on a rollercoaster building a company that is pioneering the next wave of the sharing economy. We make help accessible and automate your life. I'm a first-time entrepreneur and will probably be too honest about what that experience is like. I'm honored to be here -- ask me anything!
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Thomas Stöcklein
@tomstocklein · FoundersFundersFuture.com
How would you prevent your employees and customers from entering into direct employment arrangements and thereby cutting out the 'middleman' Hello Alfred?
@tomstocklein Great question. We were worried about this in the beginning too. Service platforms like Handy, HomeJoy, Care.com and Taskrabbit experience this challenge. However, what we've found is that we are more like Uber in this regard. When is the last time you asked for a driver's personal number to get a pickup off the platform? Probably never right? Why? Probably because Uber insures the ride, offers customer service when things go wrong and is your advocate. The same is true for the driver - they access benefits that only the scale of Uber can provide vs. individual customers can give. This is true for Hello Alfred as well.
Cornelius S. Hager
@sgfrid
How did you grow Alfreds costumer base in the first few months?
@sgfrid In the first few months we grew our customer base with dozens of experiments: offline postcards under people's doors, talking to people in Starbucks, reaching out to people on Craigslist and Facebook. Anything that would teach us something about the need people had and the things that got them to make the very considered purchase of asking for help.
Thomas Stöcklein
@tomstocklein · FoundersFundersFuture.com
What lessons, if any, have you and your team learned from the collapse of HomeJoy?
@tomstocklein Thanks for the question Thomas. Many things - and I commend the HomeJoy team for putting a big idea out there. They were pioneers. It's not fun to "fail" - but you and everyone can learn from it. The entire on demand and sharing economy got a wake up call. I've seen so many great developments focusing on labor and quality and caring about the people that power the platform.
@tomstocklein In the beginning, Hello Alfred had some trouble because people used to compare us to HomeJoy and didn't understand why we opted for W2 labor instead of 1099 contractors. They didn't understand why we were growing deliberately with unit economics that were positive instead of taking the 20,000 people who signed up off our waitlist and making the economics work later. I'm glad we took our tack. I believe you cannot scale things that are powered by people, without putting people at the center of your business. Reach is less important than quality. Great things grow slowly and then all at once. Take the time to do it right.
Emily Hodgins
@ems_hodge · Community and Marketing, Product Hunt
What's the strangest thing a customer has asked for on Hello Alfred?
@thomasgermond I went to high school in France, I would love to go back with Alfred. We have some cities to hit before we make it to the city of light. Let us know if you want to be involved ;)
Thomas Germond
@thomasgermond
@mssapone Definitely. I'm bluff by the ambition of HA. I'll make a great GM in France ;-)
Zachariah Reiner
@zsr5 · Product @Huge
Who would you consider your core demographic and what are the biggest challenges coming up this year for Alfred?
@zsr5 our best customers are people who are busy - balancing a demanding career, being a parent, running their own business - and a little help goes a long way; another important factor we see in our happiest customers is there are two people who are managing life together and trying to make making work fair. Household Equality.
Cornelius S. Hager
@sgfrid
Your Alfreds use their own cars right? How do you handle parking and bad traffic within your system?
@sgfrid in certain neighborhoods yes. We've built predictive planning into our software. Each week our system is getting smarter. We also employ a lot of common sense ;) Don't drive on Marathon Monday in Boston! If it's raining take the local roads. More left turns than right (an old UPS trick)...
Asem Alsaadi
@asemalsaadi_ · CEO, instaMek
@readbydavid I go on book binges and then have long periods of cutting out any reading I don't proactively seek out. I love this push vs pull concept from Tim Ferriss
@readbydavid here are a few books that are important to how I think about the world: The Nature of Design, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance for the why/aesthetics, Lunch with the FT to hear how great people think, Seven Strategy Questions & Management by Peter Drucker, The Power of Many by Meg Whitman, and EVERYTHING that Richard Feynman wrote or had written about him.