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Prim (YC S13) Does Your Laundry. Pickup, Wash, Fold, Delivery, Awesome

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Re: Prim (YC S13) Does Your Laundry. Pickup, Wash, Fold, Delivery, Awesome

#151

Post by eitally »

md224 wrote: post #102
pg wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These founders merely did what I advise every startup to do, build something for which they are initial market. So essentially you're complaining that the founders are members of the demographic group that they are. But that seems unfair; they can't help that.

Instructing founders to build products based on themselves as the initial market sounds like good advice, but it worries me slightly that if this advice were taken universally in tech circles, we would innovate in a fairly egocentric direction. Then again, I agree that people work better on problems that they're intimately familiar with, so I don't know if there's a good way around this.

I think that's already true, and seems to be the single biggest (albeit poorly articulated and somewhat nebulous) complaint people have about the valley. Ideas are created in the bizarro vacuum of that specific locale and fail to meet the needs or wants of the populace as a whole. But -- given the easy flow of capital the last several years -- it's easy to argue that everything is going swimmingly and there is no problem. It's takes quite an ego to align oneself with either extreme, imho.

Re: Prim (YC S13) Does Your Laundry. Pickup, Wash, Fold, Delivery, Awesome

#152

Post by bloodorange »

john_w_t_b wrote: post #62
oftenwrong wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm hoping for a doctor that makes house calls.

Try Memd.me - doctor visit over video conf.

I had to go to the doctor recently. Among the 'tests' he did was to check different parts of my chest with a stethoscope (and noted that there was a mild wheeze). Another was gently pressing particular points on my throat and asked me if it hurt. He also checked how the ears, nose and throat looked by using a bright light pointed towards them. Overall he checked for a variety of things and some of them involved physical contact.

I think it would have been hard for him to do this over a video call or have the same confidence in his diagnosis if he were not able to do these 'tests' even if his diagnosis were the same.

I myself would find it hard to feel comfortable with diagnosis that I receive over a video session. In fact unless the whole pipeline for transmitting sound from one end to the other is very good, the doctor might miss some vital clues. I say this because I once saw him mention a faint whistling sound in my wife's breathing from a few feet away (which we had not noticed until he pointed it out to us). How could he notice something small like that over a video call? How could a patient be confident that the doctors are not missing something like that over the call?

I wouldn't mind receiving consultation regarding legal, financial or technical (Programming?) matters over a video call but I don't see being comfortable receiving medical consultation through a video call.

[Edit: replied to wrong post earlier, deleted that and pasted here]

Re: Prim (YC S13) Does Your Laundry. Pickup, Wash, Fold, Delivery, Awesome

#153

Post by olliesaunders »

pg wrote: post #55
marknutter wrote: post #10

Yet 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?

These founders merely did what I advise every startup to do, build something for which they are initial market. So essentially you're complaining that the founders are members of the demographic group that they are. But that seems unfair; they can't help that.

That advice creates startups that are more likely to work, yes, but also seriously narrows the range of different startups likely to occur. You’re optimizing for reliability—not surprising, you’re an investor—not for where the need is greatest.

Perhaps once you’ve made a lot of money you could afford to optimize for where the need is greatest instead of reliability and fund tech startups tackling problems less familiar to their founders or founders from different backgrounds. This will probably be more risky but greater needs should produce greater rewards, right?

Re: Prim (YC S13) Does Your Laundry. Pickup, Wash, Fold, Delivery, Awesome

#154

Post by subsystem »

patio11 wrote: post #128
marknutter wrote: post #10

Yet 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?

If it makes you feel better: pretend you and your wife are immigrants to the United States, speak little English, are raising three children, and work long hours at a laundromat. The Internet, which you're pretty sure one of your kids has on that phone with the white earbuds, calls and tells you that it can offer you $3,000 of business. A month. For the forseeable future. No catch: they just want to pay you money to…

So inventing scenarios so we can feel better is the solution? These middlemen businesses make their money by controlling the sales channels and giving as little as possible to the actual producers. It's basically cultural imperialism.

Re: Prim (YC S13) Does Your Laundry. Pickup, Wash, Fold, Delivery, Awesome

#155

Post by bobwaycott »

netcan wrote: post #149
bobwaycott wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do people that start a business doing other people's laundry usually find themselves celebrated as a 'startup' and receive venture capital funding? This is a news story because it has YC's name attached. The objections and counterarguments, to me, provide valuable insight into what kinds of startups ought to be both celebrated and funded, as well as to gauging wider public reception for a service that is going to hav…

You're concerned about the social, economic, and environmental impacts of a laundry service? I meant puritan in a cultural sense. The kind of impulse that says you should be doing your homework or your chores, not sitting around playing Taki you lazy no good brat.

You're not concerned about the social, economic, and environmental impacts of this laundry service? This has a far greater potential footprint than a simple neighborhood dry cleaners or wash-and-fold. Especially when it's billed as a 'startup' and pitching for venture capital or other investment to reach the point where desired economies of scale will only increase that footprint in order to provide any level of viability and persistence.

I find lack of concern for the variegated impacts any business has on social, economic, and environmental dimensions far more problematic than exhibiting and evaluating such concern. At least engaging the concern can allow someone the ability to assess such impacts in determining whether or not to fund and/or celebrate such a service.

Re: Prim (YC S13) Does Your Laundry. Pickup, Wash, Fold, Delivery, Awesome

#156

Post by patio11 »

olliesaunders wrote: post #146
patio11 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it makes you feel better: pretend you and your wife are immigrants to the United States, speak little English, are raising three children, and work long hours at a laundromat. The Internet, which you're pretty sure one of your kids has on that phone with the white earbuds, calls and tells you that it can offer you $3,000 of business. A month. For the forseeable future. No catch: they just want to pay you money to…

Except the overall effect of this startup will be the opposite of what you just describe. Prim isn’t creating more dirty laundry, it’s consolidating the laundry jobs into batches that will be performed by fewer businesses than would otherwise overall. If you happen to own one of the laundromats that Prim doesn’t want to use you will see a reduction in your business. There is a saving grace for that situation however,…

I think they're probably competing with non-consumption rather than with their suppliers. Note the market segmentation and markedly higher prices, for example. (I have some accidental knowledge on this due to previous HN threads attempting to value laundry services as a perk from Big Daddy G, so I happen to know that weekly laundry pickup costs about $800 a year in SV, which is a sizable discount relative to this.)

To put it another way: they don't have to create more dirty laundry, they just have to successfully sell people on "You've always thought that poor people use the laundromat, middle class people use their own washer, and rich people have hired servants, but guess what, people just like you can actually outsource laundry without any of the squicky associations you have with hiring domestic help. It's as easy and natural as ordering a pizza."

Re: Prim (YC S13) Does Your Laundry. Pickup, Wash, Fold, Delivery, Awesome

#157

Post by jacquesm »

eitally wrote: post #147
jacquesm wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trucking laundry around, having another worker load/wash/unload/iron and then the sorting / tagging / customer service issues associated with that seems pretty inefficient. It just adds overhead without removing any of the original work. It may be that the washing machines can be more efficient at scale but for that to be the dominant factor the process as a whole would have to be super efficient as well and that is…

No kidding!! With two toddlers I do laundry daily, and frequently the cycle is "remove clothes at bath time and put them directly into the washing machine".

If only because if you don't wash it right away it tends to start walking around all by itself, and a few days later it will talk back to you.

Re: Prim (YC S13) Does Your Laundry. Pickup, Wash, Fold, Delivery, Awesome

#159

Post by ajiang »

So now we have the Uber for housecleaning, laundry/dry cleaning, cooking, shopping, babysitting(?), and at some point everything else under the sun that falls into the consumer home services umbrella. These business use technology and economics of scale to deliver convenient on-demand services at a reasonable price, with the thesis that the price becomes increasingly more reasonable with continued local density and national scale.

Is there a path to this where a large home services company is formed as a roll up of all of these types of services? Once the actual services and logistics models are proven and ironed out, it would at least on the surface appear to be many major benefits to a roll up: additional scale economies from logistics / transportation, cross-training and utilization of the service workforce, single platform for payment, cross selling services, and of course your run of the mill shared services among legal, HR, accounting, etc. I think to me the point on cross training and utilization of the service workforce is especially poignant, as these services see a lot of demand volatility, so having multiple service lines help smooth out labor productivity.

Re: Prim (YC S13) Does Your Laundry. Pickup, Wash, Fold, Delivery, Awesome

#160

Post by Leander_B »

patio11 wrote: post #128
marknutter wrote: post #10

Yet 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?

If it makes you feel better: pretend you and your wife are immigrants to the United States, speak little English, are raising three children, and work long hours at a laundromat. The Internet, which you're pretty sure one of your kids has on that phone with the white earbuds, calls and tells you that it can offer you $3,000 of business. A month. For the forseeable future. No catch: they just want to pay you money to…

You forget to pretend we add a middlemen into a business where it is completely unnecessary. Now pretend that this middlemen will take a big cut, can drop you anytime they like since I guess there will be little or less strings attached/contract, or close their business because the founding hipster has another 'brilliant' idea of disrupting something that does not need to be disrupted.
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