I fail to see the draw here, maybe someone can explain it to me. Generally, Exec is building a match making and scheduling service. They are taking cleaners/maids (which it sounds like they dont employ directly?) and matching them up with people who want to clean your house. Its like craigslist personals for maid services, with a fee off the top to wet Exec's beak.

First off, a clean apartment at the end of the day is a clean apartment. Meaning, they can't really charge more than the rest of the maid industry. So that sets an upper bound on price.

Then, maids aren't going to work for dogshit simply because the appointment was made online - so theres a lower bound to what you can pay a good maid.

The software supposedly automates the match making, scheduling, and coordinating (billing, etc), which really just helps increase the margins on what is otherwise a national cleaning service.

Now, it seems like the Exec execs and investors believe that "once they have it figured out" they can essentially add a city for free with minimal additional capital expense and almost no operational expense. Yay! Sounds like we have a national brand with crazy margins! If we just get 1% of the maid industry we will be set!

Problem is, those "margins" only pay off if you get the business. Unless the maids do a better job, or dance for you, there's a good chance if you have a maid service already scheduled there's little incentive to take the risk to try a new service. For Exec, if the cleaning service is the same (the innovation doesn't seem to be advertised as the cleaning aspect of the service) the only other value proposition for the business is ease of scheduling a cleaning visit (anyone can build a "reserve now!" function on their maid service company website), or price. Considering the first anyone can do, the second starts to eat into those investor-attracting margins.

The only way to not budge on the margins is to build a brand, which takes a lot of money. Who cares if your margins are 20% higher than industry average when you are burning all that money into acquiring customers?

Unless the business has a clear acquisition strategy, I can't see this business being competitive in enough ways that matter to the customer for their "technology" to be worth the headlines. Right now, it looks like their value prop is the automation of making a cleaning appointment. Unless that appointment can be made 10 minutes in advance and done perfectly by robots I don't see the competitive advantage. Maybe they have IP that is worth licensing to any maid service that would want to lower the operational expenses of managing a fleet of cleaning teams and inbound requests. That said, I can't envision a novel solution to this "problem" that is worth protecting with IP that another team couldn't solve differently.

To me, Exec seems like a fancy cleaning service that touts online reservations in a market already defined by what people are willing to pay for service and what price maids are willing to accept for their work. Since they don't control their margins, any race to the bottom on price better be made up with Amazon-scale sales volume. Which gets us to the crux of the point - I'm not sure that maid service logistics is the same type of problem as ordering goods ala Amazon. You can't build a business by pretending you can order maids online like you can a DVD.