South Africa’s SweepSouth is Connecting South Africans with Trusted and Reliable Home Cleaners
SweepSouth is a cleaning services startup founded in 2013 by Capetonian couple; Aisha Pandor and Alen Ribic. It specializes in regular home cleaning, on-demand home cleaning, office cleaning and BnB cleaning. Its mode of operation starts by the creation of a personalized cleaning plan by the customer, getting matched with a personal sweepstar and managing all transactions online.
The duo was inspired to start the business when they found it difficult to get a cleaner, they then decided to divert their savings into launching SweepSouth, a tech platform that allows consumers to book domestic workers digitally.
In an interview with VIA (Dstv channel 147), Pandor, who is the daughter of South Africa’s science and technology minister Naledi Pandor, said they had invested all their savings for their kids’ university fees into the business back in 2013 and they have been in the process of trying to get back on track to being financially responsible parents and adults.
In her words “we thought if we could build something like uber that uses technology that connects domestic workers looking for work with young people like us who are looking for their services.”
The platform lists available domestic workers for people to book, where SweepSouth takes a marginal commission. The domestic workers are however not directly employed by SweepSouth, but use the platform to make bookings.
At first, the couple were working alone, cleaning the houses themselves until they decided to interview and eventually recruit a few domestic workers, they currently have about 11,000 domestic workers on the platform. One average, the cleaners earn up to R8,000 per month asides tips, which beats the typical earnings of domestic workers. They presently employ about 40 employees.
In 2018, the startup made the sum of R100 million in revenue, with plans to expand into other African markets such as Kenya, Botswana, Nigeria and Ghana.
