Fyxes: on-demand home cleaning

Booking a cleaner shouldn't mean a group chat, three reschedules, and hoping the person who shows up is who you agreed to. Fyxes was my attempt to fix that for Melbourne: a proper two-sided marketplace where customers booked a clean in a few taps and cleaners ran their whole workload from the same system.

It was also the first product I built entirely on my own terms. I was the founder, the designer and the product owner, working alongside an AI-augmented team standing in for the engineering, finance and QA roles I couldn't hire for: Kai on engineering, Amy on finance, Knope on project management, Mochi on QA. Every call on scope, and especially on money and auth, got made the way I'd want a senior engineering team to make it.

The customer side starts with a home screen built around one job: get a clean booked fast. From there, a room-by-room builder (bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchen, living areas) prices the job as you go, so there's never a surprise total at checkout.

Confirmation closes the loop immediately: cleaner assigned, time and address locked in, room list itemised. No back-and-forth, no waiting to hear back.

None of that works without the other half: cleaners need their own tool to manage jobs, availability and service areas, or the whole thing turns into me manually matching bookings by hand. The cleaner app runs on the same booking data (upcoming jobs, ratings, availability), so both sides of the marketplace are looking at the same source of truth.

Fyxes launched in June 2026. I ran Meta ads, dropped flyers across nearby suburbs, offered 15% off a first clean, and recruited the supply side one conversation at a time. The top of the funnel did its job: 21 customers signed up, 19 cleaners registered, and five made it through document verification.

Then the number that mattered: zero. Not one of those 21 signups became a booking. Every booking in the production database was me, testing. The marketplace I had spent months hardening never processed a single real transaction.

When weeks of live marketing refused to move that number, I made the call to shut it down. Not because I stopped believing in the problem, but because the data had answered the question the company existed to ask, and the answer was no. Killing it quickly was the last product decision Fyxes needed from me. I think it was the best one I made.

I sequenced it backwards. I built a production system I'm still proud of: fraud signal logging, payout reconciliation, rate limiting, dispute flows. All of it defends against risks that require customers to exist. The only question that actually mattered, will a stranger pay for this, could have been answered in a fortnight with a landing page and a weekend of matching bookings by hand. I answered it last, after months of engineering. Next time: validate demand with the cheapest artifact that can produce a yes, and spend real engineering only after real money moves.

A two-sided marketplace is two cold-start problems at once, and a solo founder with a day job gets to solve one at best. Supply was winnable; cleaners answered flyers and finished verification. Demand needed a budget or a distribution edge I didn't have. I'd build a marketplace again one day, but not alone, and not as a 5-to-9.

What survived the shutdown: the AI-augmented team practice, the stack, the defensive instincts on money and auth, and a tested playbook for shipping production software solo. All of it went straight into Simply Kind, which went from first sketch to the App Store in a fraction of the time. Fyxes never returned the investment in bookings. It returned it in capability.