I may be barking up the wrong tree here, and if so I apologise. But I get the distinct feeling you may be trying to create a kind of gig economy thing and tailor it to window cleaning.
What I mean is, you may be trying to develop an app that connects customers to window cleaners in an “on demand” type of way. Eg a customer uses your app to book a service from a local window cleaner. Window cleaner turns up, cleans and leaves. Payment is processed through app etc etc.
If so, let me save you the bother. There have been a few people who have popped up and tried this in the past and it has never worked, and will never work, for a number of reasons.
Firstly, window cleaners do not want nor need it.
We don’t want random one-off jobs dotted around the town.
We don’t want to be “booked” in to do a clean on a certain day or time.
We don’t need payment processing, almost all window cleaners use faster payment or some type of direct debit system such as go cardless.
We don’t need to compete with other window cleaners for jobs in the same way that builders might compete for a job on mybuilder etc. Similarly we don’t want to be “rated” by customers as this is a notoriously unfair and arbitrary thing that causes lots of problems for even the best window cleaners. (Just try to get a vindictive google rating or review removed. It’s almost impossible. We certainly don’t want more of that)
Good window cleaners have a limited number of regular customers concentrated in specific geographical areas. We are not constantly looking for extra jobs the same way a plasterer or decorator etc would be.
There are literally no benefits at all for window cleaners to work this way.
And lastly, customers don’t want it. They don’t care enough about window cleaning to download an app to find one or even to manage the service they get from their existing one. They don’t want to pay their existing window cleaner through an app. It’s a complete non-starter.
You say you came to this after a need you had was not met. This tells you everything you need to know. The fact is there is way more demand for good window cleaners than there is supply. We don’t need any help being connected with potential customers, and we certainly don’t want or need our service to be gigified.
Every now and then some guy pops up trying to do this saying “I can help you get more clients, take payments “ etc etc. That moron from osha clean was the last one, I think (and hope) he went bankrupt. Strangely enough, he had the idea when he too couldn’t get a window cleaner himself.
It always amounts to basically the same thing, someone who knows nothing about this business who thinks they are going to make some kind of unnecessary platform and cream off 10% of the fee from our work for doing basically nothing.
My advice to you (and I genuinely mean this with your interest at heart) don’t bother trying to do this, there’s just no way window cleaners nor customers would want it. Others have tried and found out the hard way that it will never work for window cleaning.
On the other hand, if this is not what you had in mind, and you’re intention is to make a scheduling app, well that’s different! Go for it. There are a few out there, I use CleanerPlanner myself (which is excellent but stagnant) but I would certainly like other options!
