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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

#171

Post by count »

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…

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!

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

#172

Post by jacquesm »

jusben1369 wrote: post #167
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…

I actually don't think that's right. The benefits to the planet of removing 1000 small (household) washing machines and dryers and replacing them with say 10 commercial ones is very very substantial and more than offsets the "work" that's wrapped around providing this as third party service vs doing it yourself.

> The benefits to the planet of removing 1000 small (household) washing machines and dryers and replacing them with say 10 commercial ones is very very substantial

That's not a given without running the numbers. Whole picture statements like these get complicated in a hurry. Manufacturing 1000 small household washing machines creates jobs and so on.

The work to me seems to be such a big factor in this story that all other things being equal you're going to have to make the case either by ignoring a huge number of factors or you're going to have to go by a model that just focuses on the major component of the operation itself (washing).

Household washing machines last quite a long time (10 years or more), are relatively cheap, maintenance free and two steps away from the point of origin of your washing.

Commercial machines are expensive, require frequent maintenance due to increased use, may or may not be more energy efficient and require trucking around washing.

I don't think you can say that the commercial machines are more efficient due to their reduced number because that may not be where the majority of the expense is located.

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

#173

Post by yalooze »

Nursie wrote: post #136
wiml wrote: post #2

I'm under the impression that pick-up-and-drop-off laundry has been a common business in larger cities for the last, oh, century or more? Is this just a "...yeah, but this time it's on the Internet!" business model?

Yeah, I was wondering. It might have a nice web frontend, but otherwise... I was using a service like this in London about five years ago, and I'm pretty sure it's been a available as a service for as long as there have been people wanting clothes cleaned.

Do you remember any information about the service? Was it just a local laundromat/dry cleaner that did it? I'm looking for something just like that in London.

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

#174

Post by subsystem »

potatolicious wrote: post #90
dannyr wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When the PC first came out, it only catered for the rich. Same with cell phones, cars, etc. How about restaurants? Why should people eat out when it's cheaper to cook at home? If founders listen to people like you, nothing will be built.

To be fair, in places that aren't the Valley wash-and-fold services are a dime a dozen, the product is heavily commoditized, and availability is high. You wouldn't need a high-tech web-based provider of laundry, because there's a perfectly good low-tech one already doing it, doing it cheap, and doing it well. This is not a case of a new product being upmarket before working its way downmarket. It's a case where somet…

It's really nothing "tech" about this business at all. The only reason it's on HN is because it's a YC company. All the challenges are basically business challenges. SV seem to have created a culture were you can ride on the merits of technology without any actual substance.

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

#175

Post by wildermuthn »

napoleoncomplex wrote: post #126

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…

> Still, I'd like a start-up that instead of shifting my inconvenience to other people, removes my feeling of inconvenience itself.

A program that instills resiliency into people (a dual n-back for virtue) would change humanity forever. I could see it happening through future versions of the Oculus Rift.

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

#176

Post by potatolicious »

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 labor, this is a clear win.

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

#177

Post by sacrilicious »

Mazel Tov, if people in underserved markets find online arrangement and pricing simplicity a real value-add, more power to 'em. However, I live in where the local laundromats all do free pickup as a service anyway, so I have a hard time not thinking that for urban areas 'just walk the street nearby or talk to your neighbors, people!' Or, just do your laundry like you do your dishes in places that have machines in your building - unless you're so important and valuable you have a staff to arrange these things.

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

#178

Post by Nursie »

yalooze wrote: post #173
Nursie wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I was wondering. It might have a nice web frontend, but otherwise... I was using a service like this in London about five years ago, and I'm pretty sure it's been a available as a service for as long as there have been people wanting clothes cleaned.

Do you remember any information about the service? Was it just a local laundromat/dry cleaner that did it? I'm looking for something just like that in London.

The one I used serves a number of postcodes in East London (and had another location in Essex) and was called "The Ironing Board". They charge by weight, their site is here, but you have to call them rather than arrange it via the web - http://www.theironingboard.com/

I would expect there to be others in other parts of the city. I could be wrong :)

--edit-- It looks like they've been doing it for 21 years!

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

#179

Post by nayefc »

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 article, or any of that hype.

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

#180

Post by ippisl »

napoleoncomplex wrote: post #126

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…

You can easily make doing laundry relatively nice experience, just find a nice podcast to listen to. But watching game of thrones or programming something interesting is more fun.

This kind of dynamic is not with hard to beat I think.

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