changing the world, eh?
Prim (YC S13) Does Your Laundry. Pickup, Wash, Fold, Delivery, Awesome
61–70 of 216 posts
Re: Prim (YC S13) Does Your Laundry. Pickup, Wash, Fold, Delivery, Awesome
#62Re: Prim (YC S13) Does Your Laundry. Pickup, Wash, Fold, Delivery, Awesome
#63Kudos on your startup.
This is a lesson that business need not sound glamorous, it's all about finding someone to pay for it. With scale, it looks like you can make it work and keep the prices reasonable. Do ignore the negative comments and good luck!
Re: Prim (YC S13) Does Your Laundry. Pickup, Wash, Fold, Delivery, Awesome
#64Yet another startup that caters to the 20 something tech crowd with too much disposable income and too little free time on their hands. Do people in Silicon Valley ever leave spend time outside Silicon Valley?
You're focusing on the negative.
What if you found out that their goal was to reduce the total number of washers, dryers, and irons in the United States? What if washers/dryers/irons are extremely inefficient and that by reaching scale PRIM reduces consumption?
It's a longshot, I know, but try to be a little less negative.
In India, these services already exist but have no mobile platform.
Re: Prim (YC S13) Does Your Laundry. Pickup, Wash, Fold, Delivery, Awesome
#65Scott Wiener came to Google and gave a talk about pizza in NYC [1]. It was an interesting talk but one thing I remember was this: he said that you can't just cut up a sell a pizza by the slice and replicate what you have in NYC. The point of this is that pizza by the slice is a culture that comes about and continues to exist for historical reasons, namely that Manhattan (in particular) is densely populated and people…
It's true, when you break apart the business model, it is a 3rd party delivery/courier service for a niche market. This is not sustainable and has no barriers to entry.
Re: Prim (YC S13) Does Your Laundry. Pickup, Wash, Fold, Delivery, Awesome
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
Though by that time, with their customer base, they can guarantee bulk economical washing machines directly from manufacturers, discounted rental space, and hybrid or electric cars to further cut down costs.
"they can guarantee bulk economical washing machines directly from manufacturers..." Do the people running this business know anything about actually washing clothes? What makes you think they could set up and operate a commercial laundry themselves and make a profit doing it? These are a couple of young Stanford grads who originally wanted to do an "in-video advertising platform". "discounted rental space..." Why wo…
Right, because these founders have clearly spent less time thinking about operational costs and margins than the 5 minutes you've had to think about it.
And they definitely couldn't be doing something clever to increase profits.
They must not know anything about "actually washing clothes".
Re: Prim (YC S13) Does Your Laundry. Pickup, Wash, Fold, Delivery, Awesome
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
Though by that time, with their customer base, they can guarantee bulk economical washing machines directly from manufacturers, discounted rental space, and hybrid or electric cars to further cut down costs.
"they can guarantee bulk economical washing machines directly from manufacturers..." Do the people running this business know anything about actually washing clothes? What makes you think they could set up and operate a commercial laundry themselves and make a profit doing it? These are a couple of young Stanford grads who originally wanted to do an "in-video advertising platform". "discounted rental space..." Why wo…
It's laundry. Not terribly difficult from an operational perspective. Differentiation is the challenge, and this company seems to be doing well in that area.
Re: Prim (YC S13) Does Your Laundry. Pickup, Wash, Fold, Delivery, Awesome
#68A pretty awesome idea!
I wonder how the competition with the wash and fold at the corner near me would work?
Not having to walk it over seems pretty nice though...
Re: Prim (YC S13) Does Your Laundry. Pickup, Wash, Fold, Delivery, Awesome
#69I'm confused by all of these start ups that appear to be trying to disrupt TaskRabbit. From my perspective, Prim seems to offer the exact same service that I can hire via TaskRabbit so will have the same overhead cost structure (tech, marketing, etc.) but limited revenue opportunity (only clothes washing vs. any task). My TaskRabbit does my laundry and then also does whatever else I want. She does the laundry at her house, using idle equipment that she already owns.
What am I missing?
Re: Prim (YC S13) Does Your Laundry. Pickup, Wash, Fold, Delivery, Awesome
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Well maybe once everything in our country is automated, we'll have time to worry about others' automation, digital divide, and poverty."
Having just Googled that quote, I'm going to assume it was meant to be a paraphrasing of my comment/a (sarcastic?) response to it, rather than an actual quote. In any case, I didn't really mean other countries in my comment. There is a great deal of crime, starvation, poverty, and disease in this country. "Charity starts at home."
It wasn't sarcastic, it was a realist based comment pointing out the fact on how much we focus on our country's automation before moving on to other countries. I agree, eventually, after solving our digital divide issue, we'll worry about real problems. VCs invest in these services to bring what rich people had for years to the masses, and that is a maid and servants to free up your time to do what you really want to do. The economic recession has allowed numerous of people willing to do your laundry, these people picked up on that, I wonder what's next. Will there be a service to wash my dog?