Introducing Cleverly
Hello World.
In 2016, myself and my CoFounder, Andrew Jaques launched Homyze. The journey that started with this decision is for a different blog post (stay tuned), but we are really excited to announce the birth of a new venture with which we are involved:
To provide a little context, Homyze provides property maintenance and facilities management services to customers (99% of whom are businesses such as letting agents, block managers and property/estates/facilities managers).
During our time at Cleverly we have been listening very hard to clients. Painfully hard.
Sometimes we heard things that were not related to the conversation we were having with our clients. Ambient noise. Other people’s chats. Sometimes we did not identify them as such and so took action based on the information contained but although there were some false positives, we would like to think that there were few if any false negatives.
One of the most consistent messages we got from clients was how overwhelmed they are, and how much they hated the software they were being forced to use.
There are some megatrends that play into the messaging that we were receiving:
margin compression, outsourcing, the ‘consumerisation’ of enterprise software, the blending of work and personal lives, AI/ML, robotic process automation etc.
however, the message was clear. Physical-first companies (such as manufacturing companies, hospitality companies, facilities management companies etc.) and the people that served such functions within digital first businesses were struggling.
Productivity software has come an incredible distance over the last few years, and companies such as ClickUp, monday.com, Slack, Asana (and many others) are fantastic.
We use them at Homyze. We use them at Cleverly. They serve their purpose well.
What was common to all of them however was that they catered for digital processes and online collaboration (e.g. file sharing or simultaneous editing).
In the world of site attendances, supply chains, compliance requirements, manufacturing equipment, sensor inputs, scheduled services (whether this is flour delivery or floor cleaning) and more, they were not fit for purpose.
Cleverly handles all this and more (and will handle more and more going forward).
We know the challenges our customers are facing, and we want to help them realise their goals.
Sometimes it’s easier to explain things in a “It’s Uber for …”.
Well, it’s not (whereas Homyze was originally ‘Uber for tradespeople’) … but it is “Shopify Product Management for service companies” (well, at least it is today).
