LINCOLN PARK — Jim Neumann’s daughter wanted to borrow his condo by the park to host a little weekend party with friends, but she had one tiny concern.
“She said, ‘Dad, is the place clean?'” Neumann said. “And yes, it was clean. But I felt bad and tried to get maid service in anyway, but none of them would come right away, and I needed it done now.”
That was his inspiration for creating Wischen, a smartphone app he hopes will be the “Uber of cleaning services” that launched in Chicago last month.
The 49-year-old Lincoln Parker said he even picked the name, Wischen — which is German for “to wipe up” — to mimic the popular car service with a German name.
Jim Neumann says the free app has tripled what some cleaners typically make:
“If I needed cleaning service on demand and couldn’t get it, I knew I wasn’t the only one. And just as Uber did with the fragmented car service industry, there was an opportunity with maid services,” Neumann said. “And you know what? This is something that should be on demand, and we’re going to put it on the map. We got a team together and put it together quickly.”
You can book an on-demand cleaner — Wischen doesn’t call the workers “maids” — for 40 bucks an hour.
“A standard maid service comes in to measure your place or charges per room. We’ll do everything from deep cleaning to specific tasks. You can tell us to stay out of your basement or just clean the oven and bathrooms,” Neumann said.
Neumann, who works in billboard advertising sales, said the Wischen app (available on Android and coming soon to the iPhone App store) can get one of its 160 cleaners to your dirty house as quickly as two hours after you book an appointment, and your credit card gets charged when the work is done.
“We have people calling us to clean up after a party or come in and do the work they don’t want to do, like laundry or cleaning toilets,” he said. “And we do it now, when you want it done.”
When I mentioned that this is just the kind of app that could have prevented arguments, passive-aggressive dishwashing boycotts and at least one case of athlete's foot for me and more than a few of my roommates over the years, Neumann said lazy young people are already some of Wischen’s best customers.
“A lot of our customers are 25 to 35 years old with active lifestyles that just don’t have time to clean,” he said. “We even already got a call to clean a college dorm room.”
All the cleaners go through a background check, and most of them, Neumann said, are already working in the Chicago area. Some of them moonlight for him in their free time when not working their jobs at fancy Downtown hotels like The Drake.
Eventually, customers will be able to choose who shows up to clean and rate (and be rated by) that Wischen cleaner.
“It’s really pretty simple. We’re a marriage maker. We take our top cleaners and send them to your home,” he said. “And we’re hiring about 50 more cleaners to keep up with demand.”
The Chicago-based company’s business is already so booming that Neumann expects to launch Wischen services in New York, San Francisco and Phoenix by September.
“What we’re hearing is that people like that we clean on their schedule and offer a more of an a la cart menu of services,” he said,” instead of the traditional way of getting their place cleaned up, which generally is, “You’ve gotta wait 'til Tuesday.”
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