MUMBAI: Housejoy , an online platform offering various at-home services, has laid off more than 40 employees across departments to check spiralling cost structures at a time of slow revenue growth, industry insiders said.Several of the exits have been at midmanagement levels across its digital marketing, technical and back-end operations teams, they said. The layoffs come even as the Amazon-backed startup is looking to trim or shut down categories that offer little or no unit margins such as specialised lifestyle and health services. “Housejoy has reduced its exposure to operationally-intensive categories and is looking to turn the platform to a marketplace model,” said an employee aware of the developments.Another person familiar with the developments said the company would now focus mainly on fulfilment categories such as beauty and selective home services (handyman services) that enable a transaction model. Housejoy declined to respond to detailed email queries sent by ET.The firm, which has raised about $27 million, or about Rs 180 crore, in cumulative capital so far, had also explored a potential sale to OLX India Quikr and UrbanClap in the past two-three quarters, but the talks did not lead to any possible deal, said a third person aware of the negotiations.OLX India, Quikr and UrbanClap did not respond to email queries till the time of going to the press.Housejoy is now looking to focus on categories where it can provide service through the platform, thereby increasing scope for revenue accruals rather than just leadbased services where the cost of acquiring a customer is much higher than the revenue earned.For Housejoy, operational expenses in FY17 at almost Rs 8 crore per month were four times higher than monthly revenues at about Rs 2 crore, as per financial documents filed with the registrar of companies.Industry experts peg this operational burn to have further increased in FY18 with Housejoy struggling to raise capital since 2016 after it last raised $23 million from Amazon , Matrix Partners India, Vertex Ventures and others in December 2015.The online services market in India crossed $70 million in 2017 and at a compound annual growth rate of about 60%, the market is expected to grow to $300 million by 2020, according to Redseer Consulting.Amazon’s investment in Housejoy underscored its intent to enter this growing market. But after starting a pilot of its beauty services in Bengaluru earlier this year, the ecommerce major has now discontinued the service. Sources aware of the development said the service failed to pick up steam in terms of customer addition with Housejoy, which was meant to be the captive source base for Amazon’s services foray (akin to Cloudtail in retail), failing to add significant order numbers.Amazon declined to comment on the rationale for suspending its beauty services offering. “We keep testing new services we can offer to our customers. Beauty services was a pilot project in Bangalore,” said an Amazon India spokesperson in response to ET’s queries.When asked on Amazon’s plans to offer other services, the person said, “We cannot comment on future plans.”