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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

#201

Post by foobarbazqux »

potatolicious wrote: post #176
foobarbazqux wrote: post #83

Even if I have the money, I don't want more human servants, I want more automation so that the sum total of menial work done by people goes down. How about a robot that does laundry? I'm thinking of a third robot that interacts with our existing and totally fabulous washing machine and dryer robots instead of a human.

Menial work is going down. This isn't a personal servant, it's a business that's able to batch, scale, and prioritize like a scaled business. Right now, doing laundry in your own homes, it takes exactly 10 people to do 10 loads of laundry. We can reduce this to one or two people by centralizing all of this work to specialized workers, if not less. If we go by the goal of fewer people spending less time doing menial l…

I actually just don't understand why one person picking up 10 loads of different people's laundry, doing the laundry, and delivering back the folded loads requires less total minutes of work than 10 people doing 10 loads of laundry at home. Yes, it takes less people, but those people spend their lives doing laundry. Yes, servants are specialized workers.

I think there may be marginal efficiencies over people taking their clothes to a laundromat in some cases. But I've never heard of anybody with washer and dryer at home using a laundry service. Typically they'll just hire a maid to do their laundry if they really need it.

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

#202

Post by bobwaycott »

icambron wrote: post #198
bobwaycott wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This kind of sounds like referring to SF startups like Americans refer to baseball championships--'world's' startups ... 'world' series. I don't think the commenter was remarking on the lack of personal catering he experiences from SV startup land.

> This kind of sounds like referring to SF startups like Americans refer to baseball championships--'world's' startups ... 'world' series Startups in SV are a subset of startups in the world, and my argument applies to most of them (perspective: I don't live anywhere near SF/SV). Targeting a demo with a need and means makes sense no matter where the company is founded. If Prim had started in NYC or London or Hong Kon…

The connection between criticizing targeting certain demographics with disposable income for completing a chore vs not catering to him (your original charge) is not made, despite your clarifications.

The original commenter was neither complaining about the world's startups, nor about lack of personal catering.

I suppose I read your comment as far more specific than you intended.

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

#203

Post by foobarbazqux »

philwelch wrote: post #122
foobarbazqux wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only if people are willing to put up with having more servants in their lives in the interim. But if not, people will just keep doing their own laundry and the business will fold, or perhaps just reach a level where for some people it offers a slight improvement on existing laundry services. Whereas a laundry robot would be really quite the revolution, it would end up being a new mandatory home appliance after dishwa…

They do have laundry robots, they just sit on the floor and you turn dials to configure them and dump your laundry into them.

I think you probably missed what I said higher up.

> I'm thinking of a third robot that interacts with our existing and totally fabulous washing machine and dryer robots instead of a human.

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

#204

Post by kumarski »

marknutter wrote: post #197
Felix21 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mark What world changing startup have you built? Its really unfair to for anyone on the sidelines to criticize the man in the arena. Be the change you want to see in the world: if you feel they are solving the wrong problems, go solve the right ones.

You'll notice I never complained in my comment about this idea not being "world changing". I just wanted to point out that there's been a raft of startups that cater very specifically to the demographic of people who start startups in the valley (as PG acknowledged in a sibling comment). It just seems to me that SV is becoming an echo chamber.

Every technology has its early adopters. Here are examples of not so world changing startups that changed the world with early adopters from the 'luxury' crowd. Using your same logic in a previous time might have yielded the same feedback for technologies that are world changing.

Viagra is now used to save lives.

The foldit project proved video gamers can solve complex protein folding problems.

Birth control pills were initially sold to fix first world problems and is now a leading technology in giving women control of their reproductive systems.

Maybe Prim starts here, but none of us know where it will end.

50+ years ago James Lapeyre Senior stepped on a piece of shrimp and saw the shelling come off the meat. He built the first shrimp peeler. As he commoditized the world's shrimp industry making it massively popular among the rich and then scaling it to make it price friendly, he realized that the conveyor belts that fed the shrimp peeler with shrimp were rusting.

He then went on to form a half a billion dollar modular plastic conveyor belt technology that is used by 60,000 clients. Before dying he had about 130 patents in all sorts of areas. The first digital magnetic compass etc...

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

#205

Post by pg »

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.

It's only the initial product that should be for oneself. E.g. Microsoft started out making Basic interpreters for hackers, but eventually they made software for everyone.

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

#206

Post by count »

wikwocket wrote: post #187
count wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

This is the "minimum" of "minimum viable product." A lot of startups like this are started/validated by the founders and their friends doing the equivalent of picking up peoples' laundry, driving it to the laundromat in their hatchbacks, tweeting about the service while the clothes spin, returning the clothes with a smile, and hoping the customers tell their friends!

Indeed. In this case though, I think the small, nimble approach is the only one. The mega-laundry that I was talking about has no capacity to track articles through the process, and is built to handle a set grouping of article types (each with a specific type of automated folding machine, press, etc). It'd break down miserably trying to handle N types of garments from N different people...

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

#207

Post by jes5199 »

bobwaycott wrote: post #121
jes5199 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

9K over, what, four years? Yeah. I wouldn't even notice that.

2.5 years (well, at 4 loads per week, and given low-end units @ $800 total). Still. $800 over 2.5 years vs $9K over 2.5 yrs. Or, to be a tad more accurate, $0.76/load vs $25/load. That's an interesting meter you have.

Well, it's not really fair to compare the cost like that. I don't have a laundry line-item in my budget that I have to justify to a comittee- but I do have hundreds of dollars to spend on dumb ideas every week. Spending some of my disposable income on getting my laundry nicely cleaned and folded might be enjoyable enough to justify.

In the same way that I know I can cook dinner at home for just a few dollars, I still go out to restaurants several times a week and spend $20 or more on a meal. Sometimes I'd juat rather not cook, and I won't really notice the difference in the price, at least not in any long-term sense.

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

#208

Post by reverius42 »

ghshephard wrote: post #99
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 you've ever done any business travel, you know that a week's worth of laundry (Two Pants, five shirts, six pairs of t-shirts, socks and underwear) through the Hotel - usually goes for about $200-$225. If you are thrifty, and order a service, and are willing to wait for a week's delay, you can get your laundry done for about $100, but then you need to juggle logistics of actually getting your laundry to the service…

In NYC, you can drop off a bag of laundry at a Wash and Fold, and pick it up the next day clean and folded for $20.

Where is your $100 going for getting your laundry done?

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

#209

Post by ghshephard »

reverius42 wrote: post #208
ghshephard wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you've ever done any business travel, you know that a week's worth of laundry (Two Pants, five shirts, six pairs of t-shirts, socks and underwear) through the Hotel - usually goes for about $200-$225. If you are thrifty, and order a service, and are willing to wait for a week's delay, you can get your laundry done for about $100, but then you need to juggle logistics of actually getting your laundry to the service…

In NYC, you can drop off a bag of laundry at a Wash and Fold, and pick it up the next day clean and folded for $20. Where is your $100 going for getting your laundry done?

Profit, I presume? I'm not sure I understand your question.
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