Why I Started Home Hops: Building a Business in Today’s Climate

Founder Darryl McComish shares how one frustrating search for a reliable cleaner became Home Hops—and the reality of building a UK startup today.

By Darryl McComish, Founder of Home Hops · Published 2026-08-26

Home Hops did not begin in a boardroom, during a startup weekend or as part of a carefully planned ambition to become a technology founder.

It began at my kitchen table after I had spent the best part of an entire day trying to find a reliable cleaner.

My name is Darryl McComish, and this is the story of why I started Home Hops, where the original idea came from and what I have learned while trying to build a business in today's challenging economic climate.

Sometimes a business idea does not arrive as a flash of inspiration. Sometimes it arrives as frustration.

Where the Home Hops story began

At the time, I worked from home supporting children through self-directed care.

This was a role I took seriously. Because I was welcoming children into my home, I wanted the property to be maintained to a very high standard. I needed it to be consistently clean, organised and hygienic, with important surfaces cleaned and disinfected as part of my routine.

Hiring a professional cleaner seemed like the obvious solution.

I was not looking for anything particularly unusual. I wanted to find a reliable local cleaner who could attend regularly, provide a professional domestic cleaning service and help me maintain the standard my work required.

I assumed finding somebody would be straightforward.

It was not.

The day I spent trying to find a cleaner

I started with Facebook.

I searched local Facebook pages, community groups and business posts. I looked through comments and tried to work out which cleaners still operated, which areas they covered and whether they had any availability.

I then began asking friends and family for recommendations.

The entire process involved:

Searching through local Facebook groups.
Reading old posts and recommendations.
Sending messages to different cleaners.
Waiting for replies.
Asking about prices and availability.
Trying to understand which services were included.
Checking whether somebody could attend regularly.
Asking friends and family if they knew anyone reliable.

By the end of the day, I had spent hours looking for a service that should have been simple to arrange.

Eventually, a friend recommended a cleaner they had used before. That felt like progress, but the cleaner had very limited availability.

There was another problem. If one of the cleaning company's staff members was off sick, my appointment could not always be covered. I might have to wait until the following week for my home to be cleaned.

For many customers, a postponed clean is inconvenient. In my situation, it could also affect my work. Maintaining my home to the required standard was connected directly to the service I provided.

I was not simply losing a cleaning appointment. I was dealing with a disruption that could affect my own business.

In a moment of complete frustration, I remember thinking: why has nobody created an app for this?

Roll on Home Hops.

Turning frustration into a business idea

That question stayed with me.

Why was hiring a cleaner still so fragmented? Why did customers have to search Facebook, ask friends, send multiple messages and wait for individual replies just to discover who was available?

Why was there not one dedicated cleaning marketplace where customers could:

Search for local cleaning professionals.
See the services they offered.
Understand the price before booking.
Check availability.
Arrange an appointment.
Pay securely.
Find support if something went wrong.

The more I thought about the problem, the more I realised it was not unique to me.

Busy parents, carers, professionals, older people, disabled customers, landlords and small-business owners can all need reliable domestic cleaning services. The reason for booking may be different, but the search process is often similarly fragmented.

That did not mean I immediately had a successful business. It meant I had identified a problem worth investigating.

There is an important difference between having an idea and building a company capable of solving it.

What starting a business in today's climate really looks like

Starting a business in the UK can be exciting, but it can also be uncertain, expensive and lonely.

Government figures estimated that the UK had 5.7 million private-sector businesses at the beginning of 2025. Of these, approximately 5.64 million were small businesses with fewer than 50 employees.

Read the UK business population estimates for 2025.

Those figures show how important entrepreneurship and small businesses are to the UK economy. They also show how much competition exists for customers, funding, skilled people and attention.

Office for National Statistics data recorded a UK business birth rate of 11.1% in 2024 and a business death rate of 9.8%. Approximately 2.9 million businesses were active during that year under the ONS definition.

See the ONS Business Demography figures for 2024.

Starting businesses is common. Building one that lasts is the difficult part.

More recently, the British Business Bank reported that around 314,000 startups were created during 2025, an increase of approximately 1% from the previous year. It also found signs of improvement in lending, although smaller businesses continued to operate amid wider economic pressures.

Read the British Business Bank's 2025/26 market findings.

The opportunity is real, but so are the pressures.

An idea is only the beginning

When people hear that somebody has started a technology business, they often picture the finished product.

They see a website, a brand and a booking system. They do not always see the work behind them.

Building Home Hops has meant thinking about:

The problem we are genuinely trying to solve.
What customers need before they will trust a new platform.
What cleaners and laundry professionals need from it.
How bookings should work.
How prices should be presented.
How payments can be handled securely.
How identity checks should operate.
How cancellations and disputes should be managed.
How a new marketplace attracts both customers and professionals.
How to build awareness without an unlimited marketing budget.
How to keep moving when progress feels slower than expected.

A startup founder can move between product development, customer service, marketing, finance, compliance and administration in a single day.

There is no department to pass the problem to when you are the person building the departments.

The pressure behind the startup story

Entrepreneurship is sometimes presented as complete freedom. The reality is more complicated.

A founder may have control over the direction of the business while also carrying responsibility for every decision, delay and unexpected cost.

Academic research on self-employment and entrepreneurship identifies financial uncertainty and time pressure as common entrepreneurial stressors. Research has also linked these pressures with poorer psychological wellbeing.

Read the research on self-employment, stress and wellbeing.

This matters because founders are not machines.

There are days when building a startup feels exciting and full of possibility. There are other days when the list of unfinished work seems endless and every decision creates three more decisions.

My journey with Home Hops has included both.

The answer is not to pretend the difficult days do not exist. It is to understand that uncertainty is part of building something new and to keep returning to the problem that made the business worth starting.

For me, that problem was clear: finding dependable help at home should not require an entire day of searching.

The challenge of building a two-sided marketplace

Home Hops is not an ordinary online shop.

A cleaning marketplace needs two groups to succeed:

Customers looking for reliable cleaning, ironing and laundry services.
Local professionals looking for suitable work and new customers.

Customers will only use the platform if they can find good professionals. Professionals will only join and remain active if the platform can bring them genuine booking opportunities.

This is often described as the marketplace chicken-and-egg problem.

Research into peer-to-peer markets explains how digital platforms can allow smaller service providers to compete and connect directly with customers. However, successful marketplaces must solve problems involving trust, information, pricing and suitable matches.

Read the National Bureau of Economic Research overview of peer-to-peer markets.

For Home Hops, this means the platform cannot be designed only around customer convenience.

It also needs to respect the cleaners and laundry professionals doing the work.

What Home Hops is trying to change

The original experience that inspired Home Hops revealed several problems at once.

Searching was fragmented

I had to move between Facebook groups, personal recommendations and individual messages.

Home Hops aims to give customers one dedicated place to find local cleaners and laundry professionals.

Availability was difficult to understand

A recommendation was not enough if the cleaner had no space in their schedule.

A useful booking platform needs to help customers find professionals who may actually be available for the requested work.

Pricing was unclear

Social-media posts do not always explain prices or what is included. Customers may have to send several messages before they can compare their options.

Home Hops provides clear upfront pricing so customers can make a more informed decision.

Trust had to be built from scattered information

A social-media profile or recommendation can be helpful, but it does not provide every answer a customer may need before welcoming someone into their home.

Home Hops is being built around ID-checked professionals, clear service information, secure payments and visible support.

One absence could disrupt the entire arrangement

My original cleaner had limited availability. If a staff member was unavailable, there was not always an alternative.

A broader local marketplace can potentially give customers more options than relying on a single recommendation or one business's availability.

That does not mean Home Hops can promise that somebody will always be available. It means the platform is designed to make the available options easier to discover.

What I have learned from starting Home Hops

The journey is still being written, but several lessons have already become clear.

1. A personal frustration can reveal a larger problem

The idea for Home Hops began with my own difficulty finding a cleaner. However, a founder still needs to investigate whether other people experience the same problem.

Your frustration can be the starting point. It cannot be the only evidence.

2. People need to trust the solution

A cleaning platform operates around people's homes, personal spaces and working lives.

Trust cannot be added at the end as a marketing slogan. It needs to influence identity checks, payments, profiles, reviews, policies and customer support.

3. The unglamorous work matters

Registering a company, writing policies, testing booking journeys, responding to questions and fixing small problems may not create exciting social-media posts.

It is still the work that turns an idea into a functioning business.

4. You will not have every answer at the beginning

Founders often wait for the perfect plan, perfect product or perfect moment.

None of those things are guaranteed to arrive.

You need enough research to make a responsible decision, but progress also requires testing, listening and improving.

5. Building slowly does not mean standing still

A startup journey is rarely a straight line. Progress may involve rebuilding a feature, changing a process or admitting that an early assumption was wrong.

Learning can be progress, provided you use it.

6. The people providing the service matter as much as the technology

Home Hops cannot succeed without skilled cleaners and laundry professionals.

The platform must create genuine value for them as well as for customers. A polished app means very little if the professionals using it feel ignored or unfairly treated.

7. Remember why you started

When the technical, financial and administrative pressures build up, I return to that original day.

I remember the Facebook searches, unanswered questions, limited availability and frustration of wondering why there was no simpler option.

That memory keeps the purpose of Home Hops clear.

Advice for somebody starting a business today

I am still on my own founder journey, so I will not pretend to have every answer.

However, if you are thinking about starting a business in the UK, these are the steps I would recommend:

Start with a genuine problem: Be specific about who experiences it and why it matters.
Talk to potential customers: Do not rely only on your own experience.
Research the existing market: Understand what people currently use and why those options have not fully solved the problem.
Write down your assumptions: Decide what needs to be tested rather than treating every belief as a fact.
Build the simplest useful version: Avoid spending everything on features customers may not need.
Understand the numbers: Prepare a business plan, startup budget and realistic cash-flow forecast.
Expect administration: Legal, financial, insurance, privacy and compliance responsibilities are part of the business.
Ask for help: Mentors, advisers, customers and other founders can see risks you may have missed.
Protect your wellbeing: Exhaustion does not automatically mean progress.
Keep listening: A founder's job is not to defend the first version of the idea. It is to improve the solution.

What comes next for Home Hops?

Home Hops began with one person trying to solve a practical problem inside his own home.

The ambition is now much larger: to create a trusted UK cleaning marketplace that makes it easier to discover and book local cleaning, ironing and laundry professionals.

We want Home Hops to provide:

A simpler way to find local cleaners.
ID-checked professional profiles.
Clear upfront pricing.
Secure in-app payments.
Easier booking management.
Greater visibility for independent cleaning professionals.
Support when a booking does not go to plan.

We are still building, learning and improving.

This is not a story written after everything has already succeeded. It is a founder journey being shared while the work is still happening.

That is what I want this blog to become: an honest record of the decisions, difficulties, mistakes and milestones involved in building Home Hops.

Frequently asked questions

Who founded Home Hops?

Home Hops was founded by Darryl McComish after his own difficulty finding a reliable cleaner while working from home and supporting children through self-directed care.

Why was Home Hops created?

Home Hops was created to make finding and booking local cleaners and laundry professionals more straightforward. The original idea came after Darryl spent an entire day searching Facebook, asking friends and contacting cleaners with limited availability.

What is Home Hops?

Home Hops is a UK cleaning marketplace designed to connect customers with local cleaning, ironing and laundry professionals. It offers clear upfront pricing, ID-checked profiles and secure in-app payments.

Is it difficult to start a business in the UK?

The UK has an active startup environment, but founders face challenges including competition, funding, time pressure, regulation, customer acquisition and uncertainty. Official figures show that hundreds of thousands of businesses are created each year, while many others close.

Where is Home Hops based?

Home Hops is based in Dundee, Scotland, and is being built for customers and cleaning professionals across the UK.

Is Home Hops still developing?

Yes. Home Hops continues to learn from customers and professionals as the platform grows. The aim is to improve the booking experience while building a fair and trusted marketplace.

From one difficult day to a new business

I did not set out to build Home Hops because starting a company looked easy.

I started because finding a reliable cleaner was far more difficult than it should have been, and that difficulty affected both my home and my work.

The first idea was simple:

Why has nobody created an app for this?

The work that followed has been anything but simple. That is the reality of starting a business.

Home Hops is my attempt to turn a frustrating personal experience into something useful for other people—customers who need reliable help and professionals who deserve a better way to be discovered.

The journey is only beginning.

Follow the Home Hops journey and discover local cleaning professionals.