Inspiring

[martin-s]

Housekeep.com was apparently the EU's 6th fastest growing company for 2017 with revenues of 7.3m EUR.

A website as simple as finding a cleaner in London. Turning over 7m Euros in commission (I'm assuming as a platform they only include commission in their turnover. They'd struggle to support 25 staff otherwise).

https://www.ft.com/content/238174d2-3139-11e9-8744-e7016697f225

If that isn't inspiring about what a pretty simple web-based business can achieve, I don't know what is.

 

[bonusmedia]

Superb. Nice to see UK success stories. We're really pretty good at tech platforms.

I would guess the same but I'm not 100% your assumption is right, I've seen startups report it both ways. General rule of thumb for estimating revenue is $100K per employee but that's for 'bootstrapping' businesses. It's quite possible to support 25 employees without that level of revenue if they've raised millions in investment.

That FT report is fascinating - with a skeptical hat on, I'd suggest it is missing a pretty key figure - how much capital was deployed to produce those results?

Silicon Valley produces absolutely staggering growth stories, but quite often they'll chuck hundreds of millions of dollars in before a company has any meaningful revenue, and it becomes a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy - with enough capital you can achieve blanket coverage and squash competition. So the skill of impressing investors and raising capital becomes as important as producing results, which often goes badly wrong. (See Fyre Festival

 

[martin-s]

Looking at their FAQ, the cleaner gets less than £10 p/h, so you can probably assume they're taking £4-5 p/h, or about a third.

If they were including the cleaner cost in their turnover, that would equate to 2.4m EUR in commission, which is comfortable enough for the staffing numbers (and still a decent size business of course!).