7
16 Comments

Roast this idea

Uber/Airbnb for laundry.

A marketplace for making laundry.
Where if you don't own a laundry machine you can check who offers to do laundry in your surroundings/neighbourhood/or even in your own building.

Those who have laundry machines can make money of it (since most of the time its not working, so it can passively make money for you).

Thoughts?

  1. 4

    There's definitely something to this. The key here is to make this a service where you gain access to their home (like a cleaner) and pick up/drop off the laundry.

    Once you have the customer's trust to enter/leave the home you can expand into different delivery options. You could easily drop off groceries, meal deliveries, etc.

  2. 4

    Even as a guy I’m not into the idea of a stranger handling my clothes. Especially when you have to engage with the same person whenever you deliver and collect your laundry. That feels very personal.

    However, I can see Laundry-as-a-Service (collected and dropped-off in the same way that hotels deal with their bedding and towels) may be successful in large cities.

    1. 1

      The latter idea is good. All you would need to figure out is the logistics: Minimizing time taken, optimizing pickup/drop off routes, and most of all not losing/mixing up clothes!

  3. 3

    A lot of risk with ruining and lost clothes to be considered.

  4. 2

    Feels like this has been tried quite a few times? Have you researched others who tried this?

  5. 2

    Awesome idea! But I stay about from marketplaces.

  6. 2

    There could be something here. I wouldn't want someone else in my house using my machines, but I can see running it as a service where customers drop their laundry off with the provider and pick it up when it's done (or the provider could offer pick up and drop off service). The provider could offer folding, ironing, etc for an extra charge.

    A big advantage over a laundromat is that you don't have to wait around while your laundry is being done. Instead you get notified when it's ready.

    Of course anytime you deal with the public it can get pretty bad. Imagine someone drops a bag of dirty cloth diapers at your front door. Ewww...

  7. 2

    There's a really cool example of a laundry service that was validated/offered in India in the first chapter of The Lean Startup. Definitely worth checking out.

  8. 1

    How about an on-demand service like https://www.washmen.com/ ?

  9. 1

    In my area in northern Germany, that wouldn't work. There's an excellent laundry service within waking distance and they charge €5 for washing, ironing, folding a big bag of laundry. That also already includes an insurance to protect me as the customer from them accidentally ruining one of my dress shirts. When I was traveling in Spain and Italy, they had similarly good and similarly priced laundry companies.

  10. 1

    I know that in the lean startup one of the case studies was this exact thing but for small towns in India which really need it.

  11. 1

    If a person doesn't have a laundry machine she or he usually can visit a public laundry. I don't think somebody would like to have strangers in their house just to make extra couple of bucks.

  12. 1

    i see another thing to add,you could use it to create in house laundry. Some people don't love to clean and fold their colthes

  13. 2

    This comment was deleted a year ago.

    1. 1

      Wait, like someone comes to your home and cooks?

      1. 1

        This comment was deleted a year ago.

        1. 1

          No joke, that’s a great idea. I know multiple people who make food and sell it to their friends/coworkers.

          Let me know what’s going on with it. I’m interested

          1. 1

            This comment was deleted a year ago.

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