Good feeling
My local dry cleaner has been struggling lately.
I noticed he recently listed the business for sale, so as a founder of my own SaaS, I figured I should offer some free business advice.
“Why don’t you just do dry cleaning for free?”
He looked at me like I’d lost my mind.
“What are you talking about?”
I explained that his customer base would probably double overnight. Then, with a completely straight face, I told him he could probably raise $30M.
He paused. Then asked me an important question:
“Why don’t you leave before I call the police?”
Always feels good to help small business owners.
These moments are probably what make all the boring weeks of building worth it. It’s easy to forget progress when you’re always thinking about the next feature or problem. Nice to stop and appreciate a win once in a while
The hardest part of LinkedIn outreach for me is finding the balance between personalization and actually being able to do it at scale. Too generic and nobody replies, too personalized and it takes forever. Interested to see how you structure your first message
Those small wins hit differently when you’ve been working on something for a long time with no guarantee that anyone will care. Definitely worth enjoying the moment before immediately moving on to the next problem 😄. What was the milestone that finally made it feel real for you?
Those small wins hit differently when you’ve been working on something for a long time with no guarantee that anyone will care. Definitely worth enjoying the moment before immediately moving on to the next problem 😄. What was the milestone that finally made it feel real for you?
That’s a great feeling. One of the best signals when building a product is seeing that the work is actually starting to compound whether that’s users, feedback, revenue, or simply knowing you’re solving a real problem. Congrats, and hope you keep sharing the journey.
The 9/11 IT migration story in the replies is doing a lot of work here — it's basically the missing "when free actually works" caveat to your bit. Free-with-no-recurring-hook on a business where the marginal cost per customer is real (fabric, chemicals, a guy's actual time pressing shirts) isn't a growth hack, it's just going out of business faster with extra steps.
Also, "I'd raise $30M for a laundromat" is genuinely the correct pitch for at least three YC batches in 2021.
The joke lands, but free actually was my growth engine once. After 9/11 I did free IT migrations for companies rebuilding out of lower Manhattan, and those became the customers who paid me to run their infrastructure for the next twenty years. Free works when the free thing is the painful part and the recurring work is the business, which dry cleaning does not have, so the police response was fair.
The 'personalize 20 strong prospects over 200 generic blasts' point matches what I just lived through on the email side: I sent 31 fully hand-researched cold emails for my product launch - each opened with something specific the person had actually written. Within hours I had a warm reply from someone whose blog I'd read for years. Genuinely-researched outreach is a different sport from template outreach. One thing I'd add: those 31 emails took two evenings to write, and that cost IS the moat - anyone doing 200 a day can't fake it.
The dry cleaner is wrong and you're right, he just needed a comparable. MoviePass sold 15 USD /month all-you-can-watch tickets below cost, went from about 20k subscribers to over 3M in under a year, and was shut down by 2019 with its parent company in bankruptcy. So the model works beautifully right up until the part where it doesn't 😉
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