Our $200k investment mistake!

Derrick, an accountant, had always been fascinated by the science of technology and the art of numbers, but has always had a hard time finding the right way to combine the two in his professional career.

Having worked on the early stages on Elance in Ghana, the company you might know better now as Upwork, Derrick began to fall in love with the idea of giving people the flexibility to work when and where it best suits them. That’s when, after the sale of Elance to OdeskElance, he decided to join his wife Gloria, a medical laboratory technologist, in Canada and decided to start down the path of founding his own platform.

The first project to come from Derrick was ZeroPay, a disposable credit card service that would give Canadians the same level of financial flexibility that was so common in Ghana. The platform would allow everyday Canadians to make business to business payments, business to consumer payments and credit card payments in a much more open, transparent, and flexible way. It was during the ZeroPay journey that Derrick and Gloria came to realise just how important flexibility and transparency were for the day-to-day lives of normal people. It was the news that Derrick’s old freelance platform Elance had raised its fees and was rebranding itself as OdeskElance that inspired the pair to look back to the freelancing world and start making plans for AceBy.

AceBy was designed to be a cutting-edge mobile platform to hire trusted professionals in your local area. A competitor for the likes of UpWork and Freelancer, but with a focus on allowing professionals to choose work in their local area and work around any other responsibilities that they might have. Over the course of 2 years, $200,000 went into developing AceBy into a modern, accessible and ethical platform for workers to find local freelancing jobs. While the platform allowed workers from just about any field to find jobs, there was consistently one type of job that was doing just that much better than all the others...cleaning.

As they saw the cleaning services become the dominant product on AceBy, Gloria and Derrick started to think about how they could make the experience even better for the cleaners and the customers. The idea that popped forward was that so many of the best concepts are simple on the surface and keep the complexity for the backend. This would make the experience simple and stress-free for the customer and vendor, and save all the complexities for Derrick, Gloria and their team. That’s where AceBy began to morph into the TIDY app of today.

It was all about taking the best of AceBy and making a platform that provided the best possible user experience for consumers looking for a professional cleaning service. This came alongside a new focus on making life easier for the owners of rentals and Airbnbs. If homeowners could get a fantastic clean from a local professional, why couldn’t someone with a few properties to prepare before the next guests or tenants arrived?

Ultimately, it was Gloria and Derrick’s close relationship with their investors that allowed the AceBy rebranding and refocusing into TIDY app to go off without a hitch. Inspired by the smart change of focus and the new potential, their investors raised another $250,000 to help take TIDY app to the next level. Gloria also took the day-to-day reins of the operations as CEO, as Derrick turned his expert eye to the financial and infrastructure side of the business.

TIDY app now operates across North America and Europe, bringing opportunities to local cleaning professionals, and bringing some peace to the lives of normal people everywhere. It’s been a long journey, from Ghana to Canada, from Elance to AceBy to TIDY app, but the blessings and rewards that have come along the way have made it all worth it. Derrick and Gloria are only getting started, and there’s always more to come.

To download the TIDY app, go to https://tidyapp.io/