Karen and I started Gmaids, a home cleaning service, after working for a bad employer and being introduced to multilevel marketing, ultimately driving us to become entrepreneurs.
Back in 2002, Karen and I were selling door-to-door cookware in hot and humid Houston, TX trying to get ahead in life as a young 18 and 21-year-old couple.
In the afternoons, we used to go to the big-box retailers looking to meet people to eventually visit and demo our cookware. One night during our regular visits to these retailers, we met a lady who introduced us to a multilevel business. We got started in it and did our very best for four years, but saw zero results. ☹️
One of the members in this group saw us in such bad financial shape that they brought us to clean homes with them to learn the basics so we could clean for others. Soon after, we started working for a home cleaning service as employees. A few months later, due to bad management and how they treated us, we decided to start a cleaning company of our own. That's how Gmaids got started and the firestarter to Pipehire.
We tried many applicant-tracking softwares / apps for small businesses and task-management tools to avoid things falling through the cracks. Our main issues were:
No software or tool was designed for the residential cleaning industry, nor had the cleaning-business owner in mind, that could help in the process of making hiring and management easier. In 2017 I started to draw a concept of a funnel-type website that could give a score to my job applicants. I asked my brother, Luis, to help us find a web developer to help us do it for our own cleaning business.
Luis was into cycling and he remembered that Ruben, an old friend in this cycling group, had quit from United Nations as senior developer. He reached out to him and, soon after, started working on improving Gmaids' back-end software and learning about the challenge of hiring cleaning employees. After a few months of coding, we came up with a scoring system for recruiting employees based on their answers, which will make hiring and recruiting easier.
So after building and making hiring easier for Gmaids, Pipehire was launched to the public in March 2020 as a standalone HR and management software for cleaning services. We're focused on building software tools for growing residential cleaning services across the U.S. and the world.
Best,
Juan, Luis and Ruben
Feel free to contact us with any questions! support@pipehirehrm.com