From cleaning up around the house to home maintenance, raking leaves and shoveling the sidewalk, chores often end up eating up significant portions of our precious free time.
Chicago startup ChoreRelief is betting that people will pay to get some of that time back.
“Chores are a necessary part of life, but a lot of people really don’t have the time or the desire to do them,” said founder and CEO Tarik Khribech.
ChoreRelief is a marketplace that lets consumers hire professionals to take care of these odd jobs for them. Through the app, customers submit a chore along with a budget and choose whether they want a service provider to arrive within the next 30 minutes or during a scheduled time later on. The request is then sent to contractors who can decide whether they’re up for the task or not.
This on-demand availability, said Khribech (pictured right), is what sets ChoreRelief apart from traditional operators in the space. If you’re looking for help to clean your house every week, a regular cleaning service may suit your needs. But if you want your house cleaned before a dinner party on a Saturday, or if your faucet springs a leak on a Sunday afternoon, your options quickly become more limited.
Moreover, Khribech said, ChoreRelief strives to make its solution work well for both consumers and providers. The company’s app for operators helps to automate scheduling and payments, which can be time-consuming for independent business owners. Consumers, on their end, can read through customer reviews before picking a professional and leave reviews of their own once the task is completed.
Services offered through the platform range from cleaning, landscaping and snow removal to simple home maintenance. To ensure the quality of the services delivered, each provider has to specialize in one or two chore types. And in addition to a standard background check, workers are vetted through interviews before they are added to the platform.
“We want to make sure they are people-friendly and willing to go above and beyond to make sure the customer is satisfied and happy before we approve them as a business we want to partner with,” said Khribech. “This is a relationship business we’re building. We want to make sure we send the right individual to your home.”
ChoreRelief is based out of 1871 and has been working on its platform for about a year and a half. The company is coming out of stealth mode on Wednesday at the FUND Conference, with an official launch slated for mid-October.
ChoreRelief's services will be available in select northern Chicago suburbs at first, with plans for a rapid expansion to cover the entire Chicagoland area.
Images via Shutterstock and ChoreRelief.
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