181–190 of 216 posts
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?
I don't get it. Online laundry shops have been there for years. I've had my laundry picked up, washed, folded and delivered a few times. Why does it need a Y-Combinator backed-startup? Can't wait to see a job posting asking for a "full-stack engineer". This is a typical laundry business: there's hundreds of them everywhere, all "startups" (in the original non-techy sense) who make money. They don't need a Techcrunch…
(Obviously YC is smart enough to give this a thought, curious to know what they think)
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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.) T…
The problem these guys are going to have is that the quality of third party wholesale laundry is poor, always. Generally, what I see happening is that you have a mom & pop cleaner business who operates for years doing their own stuff. Then they grow / have equipment troubles / retire and bring their kids into the business / etc and move to either a centralized laundry plant model or outsource some or all of the cleaning.
Once that happens, your shirts get lost, buttons get crushed, etc.
So you have a premium service dependent on third parties for service delivery -- who usually suck. Hopefully they'll find a solution to those issues.
I don't get it. Online laundry shops have been there for years. I've had my laundry picked up, washed, folded and delivered a few times. Why does it need a Y-Combinator backed-startup? Can't wait to see a job posting asking for a "full-stack engineer". This is a typical laundry business: there's hundreds of them everywhere, all "startups" (in the original non-techy sense) who make money. They don't need a Techcrunch…
Not only it doesn't seem to "need a startup", I wonder what the founders and YC thought about the barrier to entry to the market. If there are already several competitors in this space, what would be the expected good outcome? A single company outlasting its rivals and leveraging economy of scale? (Obviously YC is smart enough to give this a thought, curious to know what they think)
Current online laundry services are physical laundry spaces, that are leveraging the internet for the area around them. I guess no one has done it at a larger scale yet.
I had an argument about these type of services when Instacart showed up, not a well-thought out one, but here goes. My first thought with these services is always "that's cool!". I'll save time, won't have to bother with some boring task etc, no more inconvenience! Same reaction with Instacart. Then I questioned that reaction. The store where I buy all my food is roughly a 100m away from my apartment, and it takes me…
The truth is, there is no inconvenient tasks. The only way to remove inconvenience is to enjoy the things that you do. The only way to do that is to be completely present in the here and now - concentrate on setting one foot in front of the other on the way to the convenience store. Notice the miracles all around you - the plants; the other people; the raindrops; etc. You don't need anyone to teach you this, you alre…
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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…
Funny, isn't it?
Look, I applaud anyone out there hustling for business. And in that sense, this is a very interesting small business idea. But I'm not sure how it needs (deserves? earns?) VC funding. It isn't terribly novel (there are 4 or 5 SF competitors listed in the article), there's no barrier to entry and I don't fully understand how $25 can cover all courier/labour costs without it using minimum wage labour.
Yet, somehow people are making the leap that the path leads from from here to replacing all home washers and driers with large, centralized, industrial laundromats, with hybrid electric logistics, all run by solar power? Interesting.
I think this is a tough thing to scale. But I've been wrong before.
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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…
My father is the facilities manager for a huge industrial laundry facility (tons a day). I was trying to figure out how you'd keep everybody's clothes separate as they went through those gigantic tunnel washers and other equipment. I never even though to just outsource to existing laundromats / dry cleaners. Ha!
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"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".
I think the SV deadpool is rife with founders who spent too little time thinking about operational costs and margins.
Just sayin'.
Next, we'll see the return of the milk man and we'll almost be in time for living just like exactly a century ago. These are not fresh, new ideas.
Most good ideas have precedents. The iPad was not the first tablet by a long shot. Nor was Dropbox the first service to offer syncing and backup. The difference, as here, was in subtle implementation details. But, as here, a small difference in implementation multiplied by a basic human need = great value to users.
The one difference is "subtle implementation details."
Another is very slick marketing spin. The people who make the big bucks are not those who invent a new thing. It is those who present it in the right light, as a total seamless solution that solves your problem in an exciting way.