“Let’s, Like, Demolish Laundry”

http://nymag.com/news/features/laundry-apps-2014-5/#print

by killerdhmo • 12 years ago

161 129 12 years ago

mmanfrin• 12 years ago

(I dont mean to nitpick one paragraph, but: )

"One Wednesday morning this spring, after staff at Washio had gathered for their daily “stand-up” meeting—a ritual suggested in the Manifesto for Agile Software Development, a 2001 work-processes manual that advocates keeping employees on their toes by having them give status updates literally on their feet"

What an absurdly overwritten way of saying 'at their morning meeting'.

md224• 12 years ago

Eh, I think you're thinking about this sentence as an engineer and not a writer. The author wants to draw you into the philosophy of software development, with its mix of processes and productivity hacks; the elaboration in that sentence serves to paint a more vivid picture of the tech work environment. Of course, we already know all this, but many readers from outside our field may find these descriptions illuminating.

cgriswald• 12 years ago

As I writer, I feel the author is painting a picture that has been painted a thousand times before. In that particular paragraph, the additional material dominates the paragraph at the expense of the main point (which itself is strangely spread over a block of paragraphs).

As a reader I felt my time was wasted. Some explanation was in order, but I did not need to know the origin of the technique. "Work-process manual" is snooze-inducing.

Rewritten:

This spring, after staff at Washio had gathered for their daily "stand-up" meeting–in which employees are kept on their toes by giving status updates literally on their feet–operations manager San Nadler broke some bad news.

This draws the reader a bit into the meeting and explains what is meant by a "stand-up meeting" without bogging the reader down in details or the "philosophy of software development." If that philosophy was important for the author to communicate, it really deserves its own paragraph.

xcntktn• 12 years ago

There is a big difference between a simple meeting and the overly-gimmicky nonsense ritual that is known as the "standup". I've even seen standups where people are forced to hold a heavy book as they talk just to ensure they don't talk too long.

How about people drop all the BS and just learn how to properly run a meeting? The gimmickry of the standup is a covert way of saying "no one here trusts anyone else to exercise restraint and common courtesy, so instead we have to come up with these harebrained schemes to enforce it".

forgottenpass2• 12 years ago

How about people drop all the BS and just learn how to properly run a meeting?

The tribal knowledge in startup management is to half-ass a blog post you once read about how to manage employees. Why would someone invest valuable mental cycles making a company run better when they could be planning their exit?

anigbrowl• 12 years ago

The point is that most businesses don't formalize the requirement to hold meetings standing up. Either people stand up as a matter of course (eg construction workers), or they hold their meetings in comfy chairs (generic office workers).

analog312• 12 years ago

My feet start to hurt after the second or third hour of consecutive morning stand up meetings.

jdale27• 12 years ago

Not to mention that the Agile Manifesto doesn't actually say anything about meetings, standing or otherwise.

vilhelm_s• 12 years ago

My favourite line was

They chose the name ninjas in part to signify the company’s relationship to Silicon Valley, where the title is handed out freely.

Just like Canadian engineers complain about the term "software engineer", I hope there is some remote Japanese ninja clan grumbling that "these guys didn't even pass the ninja board exam!"

maaku2• 12 years ago

I am a ninja, or was for a number of years, and I chuckle then sigh everytime I hear that. These people wouldn't know a ninja if they met one.

npsimons• 12 years ago

These people wouldn't know a ninja if they met one.

Isn't that kind of the point of a ninja?

sjtrny2• 12 years ago

Canadian engineers?

patmcc• 12 years ago

In Canada, "engineer" is a very specific title that refers to someone who is licensed as a professional engineer, including all the degree requirements, testing, vetting, etc. that go along with that. It's quite similar to "doctor" or "lawyer" in that way.

To call yourself an engineer you need an Engineering degree from a qualified institution (4 or 5 years), at least 2 years of apprenticeship (effectively), and to pass a difficult examination.

They're not typically huge fans of people who haven't done those things calling themselves "sanitation engineers" or "software engineers" instead of "janitors" and "programmers". The argument I usually hear is that it undermines their profession; people can hold the work of an engineer to a particular standard. If suddenly I can say "oh, I'm a software engineer" without anything backing that up, it damages the reputation of "engineer" if I behave poorly.

anonymfus• 12 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ritual_of_the_Calling_of_an...

yzzxy• 12 years ago

It's a great way to brand though. Ninja has really strong aesthetic qualities and while possibly a bit cheesy, it tells users EXACTLY what how laundry delivery will make them feel: like a warlord commanding an small, elite force to do his bidding.

throwaway7767• 12 years ago

The idea of ninjas was kinda cool when I was thirteen.

The idea that the guy who delivers my laundry is a "ninja" is just cringeworthy to me. Maybe it's a SF thing.

megablast• 12 years ago

In France, everybody is an engineer.

kgin• 12 years ago

I wonder if they realized how much of a hit piece this was going to be.

killerdhmo• 12 years ago

I have to assume they didn't know. I assumed it was all fiction until I started looking up these companies.

twfarland• 12 years ago

I still have trouble believing it isn't (very dedicated) satire.

smacktoward3• 12 years ago

The thing that leapt out at me the most strongly from this article is how none of the laundry startups appear to actually do any laundry. They all outsource that work to other companies, like the one mentioned in the article, Wash Then Fold -- companies that tilt heavily towards being run and staffed by immigrants, who do the actual work involved with cleaning clothes while the white-kid startups grab the headlines.

That seems like a really precarious position for those startups to be in. First there's quality-control: the #1 thing that's going to wreck your relationship with a laundry customer is if you mess up their clothes, and if all the clothes-handling is outsourced, how much can you do to prevent that from happening?

And second, if all the value you bring to the table is a thin layer of code over someone else's service, at some point that someone else will just write their own app and cut out the middleman. "Climbing the value chain," the MBAs call it -- start off as a provider of outsourced services to companies whose executives' noses are too high in the air to do their dirty work themselves anymore, and then slowly shoulder those companies out of the way by establishing direct relationships with their customers at a lower cost. It's a strategy Asian hardware OEMs have been pursuing with success for decades -- there's no shortage of people who used to be IBM and Dell customers who are Lenovo and Asus customers now.

freehunter• 12 years ago

The problem with your suggestion that these laundry companies will write their own app is that they probably won't. They're probably eking out a small profit, and adding the cost of hiring a programmer as well as technical customer service and delivery drivers massively out of their reach. What makes me say this? Well, are there any nationwide dry cleaning chains? What is the markup on dry cleaning? How successful are the best dry cleaning shops? And, as mentioned, they lean towards being run and staffed by immigrants. They can make a living, but I would doubt it affords them enough of an income to run a silicon-valley startup.

dllthomas• 12 years ago

"Well, are there any nationwide dry cleaning chains?"

Yes:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martinizing_Dry_Cleaning

smacktoward3• 12 years ago

If there's enough profit in there to support a company dedicated solely to an app, there's enough profit for it to be worth the laundry service provider (hey, there's a new acronym: LSP) pushing them out of the way, no?

are there any nationwide dry cleaning chains? What is the markup on dry cleaning? How successful are the best dry cleaning shops?

These all seem like bigger knocks on the viability of Wash.io et al than anything else.

And, as mentioned, they lean towards being run and staffed by immigrants. They can make a living, but I would doubt it affords them enough of an income to run a silicon-valley startup.

Putting aside the "Those People don't know how to make money like we do" argument, this strikes me as short-sighted. Because clearly the startups think there's enough money in laundry to support Silicon Valley lifestyles, right?

Of course, they could be wrong about that... but again, in that scenario I'd be worried more about the future of the startups than of the people actually doing laundry at scale.

potatolicious• 12 years ago

There's a middle ground. The average small-time laundry operation definitely doesn't have the kind of cash flow to produce a serious challenger app.

And restaurants don't have the means to produce their own restaurant management software, or the software stack necessary to enable deliveries. But these two features are commonplace in restaurants because of white-label middleware providers.

Here in NYC I've been seeing more and more restaurants advertise their own website as a way to order delivery, as a way to get around Seamless/GrubHub's per-transaction take, and offering discounts to switching to their platform.

Both directions are viable. Wash.io and their kind can, with significant capital, eventually do laundry themselves and eliminate the individual laundry shops entirely. Likewise, individual laundry shops stand a realistic chance of purchasing middleware and cutting out the aggregator frontends.

guelo• 12 years ago

The difference between the established small business and these startup "businesses" is that the startups are well-connected, usually young white males, that get access to Sillicon Valley's Wall Street money spigot. They don't have to worry about such mundane things as profit so they can try to take over a market and destroy hundreds of small businesses that were bootstrapped slowly over years of toil. If the small businesses somehow were able to get access to free investment money I'm sure they could also come up with creative ways to expand since they know their market well.

pcl• 12 years ago

And, as mentioned, they lean towards being run and staffed by immigrants. They can make a living, but I would doubt it affords them enough of an income to run a silicon-valley startup.

Many successful companies [citation needed] have been built by immigrants.

netcan• 12 years ago

Aggregating and marketing (as in bringing to market) is not as thin a layer as it may seem. Ebay, airbnb, etsy - these are "thin layers of code" too.

smacktoward3• 12 years ago

Ebay and Etsy don't have to pay for teams of "delivery ninjas" in every city who pick up goods from sellers and deliver them to the buyers. They leave all that to UPS/FedEx/USPS/etc.

Ebay and Etsy also aggregate lots of sellers along with lots of buyers, which makes it harder for any one seller or buyer to corner their end of the newly created marketplace. But from the article, it sounds like several of the laundry startups are all really just frontends for Wash Then Fold. That gives WTF (hey, I just realized how clever their name is) a pretty fair amount of clout over them all.

If that's the case, it actually suggests a pretty clever business strategy for WTF: let the startups burn other people's money proving the market and finding out what sort of features people want in a laundry app, and then once that's established swoop in and do the same thing yourself. Free R&D!

rayiner• 12 years ago

Aggregating and marketing is most valuable when the service providers are small entities, ideally individuals, that cannot effectively market themselves, or where you're in a situation where there are numerous sellers that need to be connected to numerous buyers. That's a lot less true when talking about laundry service than market places like EBay.

latj• 12 years ago

Airbnb was not just the website. The original network of hosts WERE airbnb people and friends. That is a huge asset for bootstrapping. And now they have real customer service- which I think is going to be the one thing (within their control) that is going to make them a success or not.

I agree a laundry startup should definitely be on top of quality control. Also, doing the laundry makes for a much better story. :> Imagine local news footage of thin dudes with sarcastic mustaches and tight jeans moving stuff from washer to dryer. That's gold.

jgalt212• 12 years ago

Etsy also has a thin layer of revenues.

$1B in revenues if you count them the way GRPN does, and approx $35M if you count net revenues.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-11-12/etsy-tops-1-billion...

emmett2• 12 years ago

Actually, the reverse happens far more often. If a company manages to insert themselves between you and your users, they can then work their way down the value chain and replace you as a supplier. It works both ways and typically the company with the direct consumer relationship has the advantage.

pbhjpbhj4• 12 years ago

Could you, or anyone, give some examples please?

jonnathanson• 12 years ago

For whatever it's worth, many (if not most) brick & mortar laundry and dry cleaners outsource their work, as well. Very few of them will actually clean your clothes themselves, on the premises. They are middlemen. They take your clothes, ship them off to be cleaned, then return them to you for a modest margin.

stevetjoa• 12 years ago

I like wash.io. I can't afford to use it every time (I think I've used it only three times so far?), but each instance left me satisfied. I find it especially useful for wash+press and dry cleaning where the alternative is to bring your clothes to a dry cleaner -- not convenient without a car.

A good strategy is to wash towels and pants yourself (these are heavier and therefore costlier to wash, and relatively easy to fold and put away yourself), and give the shirts and jackets to wash.io to wash, press, and fold.

brian_cloutier• 12 years ago

This author is almost showing off, they can be funny on demand.

First they front load with some great jabs at startups and the hedonic nature of man to get you interested, then call back to them just before they expect you to get bored.

The pacing is a little slow near the end, but otherwise the writing here is quite good.

dinkumthinkum2• 12 years ago

Why does it seem like Washio paid for this article. ? I imagine they did not but it just seems odd.

harryh• 12 years ago

Obligatory pg link: http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

Pxtl2• 12 years ago

Really? The whole article had such a thick layer of sarcasm and derision about the whole start-up world it's hard to imagine any start-up paying for this.

dinkumthinkum2• 12 years ago

I guess, I admit I didn't read the whole thing. It seemed like a typical startup worskup TechCrunch type so I have up half way in.

normloman2• 12 years ago

Admittedly, it's unfair to print the quotes without editing out "like". Most people fill empty space in their speech with "like", "um", or some variant. And most reporters edit them out from quotes, to keep their sources from sounding like total morons.

That said, if you're running a business described as "uber for laundry", hiring "ninjas", and paling around with Mila Kunis and Ashton Kutcher, you've already forfeited the right to be taken seriously by anyone.

dredmorbius• 12 years ago

"to keep their sources from sounding like total morons"

That's, like, the point.

enraged_camel• 12 years ago

I thought Kunis and Kutcher are actually decent people? Why is hanging out with them a problem?

normloman2• 12 years ago

It doesn't matter how nice they are. It's still pretty surreal to be talking to them about your laundry delivery app. At that point, you realize how absurd your life has become, and give up any hope of being taken seriously.

noonespecial• 12 years ago

Up next, the Airbnb of the Uber of laundry! Connecting people who do laundry to those who need it done. It all comes back around to mom doing your laundry. It just doesn't have to be your mom anymore.

daktanis• 12 years ago

"Making the wold a better place."

peterwwillis4• 12 years ago

This 'hedonic treadmill' reminds me of the constant battle i'm in to reduce the bullshit I don't need in my life. It started with canceling my cable service and terminating my Xbox Live subscription. Later it led to giving away all my furniture and moving, only taking as much crap as I could fit in my car (and a bike on the car).

Now i'm feeling the creep of excess crap again. Entertainment systems I don't use. Drawers of clothes and shoes, racks of jackets and suits I don't wear. A small mountain of various bags, boxes, knick-knacks, toys and other junk I haven't looked at in 6 months. I tried to live without a smartphone for a few months but it was just too fucking convenient, and CHEAP at $70 cash! I'm back on the Android again.

Why is this seemingly the fate of all modern industrialized middle-class Americans? Like George Carlin said, a house is basically just a place to keep all our stuff. But why we need all that stuff, while the majority of the world doesn't seem to be so materially obsessed, I used to think was anyone's guess. Now i'm starting to think the hedonic treadmill might be a kind of social disease that needs to be treated more seriously.

XorNot• 12 years ago

I have tons of stuff - it's spare parts and materials to make other stuff. I never want to throw anything out until it's a tangled pile of shredded debris if I can avoid it.

The alternative is just blunt consumerism - assuming I can buy things when I need them, and constantly being at the mercy of price-gouging suppliers.

I don't even know why you'd reach the conclusion that you shouldn't have useful things - i.e. a smartphone.

peterwwillis4• 12 years ago

I don't even know why you'd reach the conclusion that you shouldn't have useful things

A lot of things are useful. I'm sure there's a gadget out there that will wipe my ass for me and tell me what I had for dinner. Doesn't mean I need it, though. I think a simpler life is probably a happier one, and the things we find useful are often just used against us in some way or another. Instead of focusing on the things we could have that would make our lives better, perhaps we should focus on what truly matters and try not to use anything we don't need? Just an idea anyway.

lilsunnybee3• 12 years ago

Quit your job and volunteer until you run out of money, then get a job doing something worthwhile for lower pay. With less disposable income, i think you'd find yourself buying less stuff, because you can no longer afford it. Groceries, rent, utilities, transportation, healthcare, occasionally clothes and toiletries are quite expensive and all-consuming income-wise for most people, those without cushy jobs at least.

knocte• 12 years ago

wow, super expensive, I still prefer to do the laundry myself...

curmudgeon224• 12 years ago

My advice: As long as the VC's want to subsidize bad business models that cater to narrow markets, I say, take advantage of it while you can cuz it ain't gonna last forever.

mmcclure• 12 years ago

I used Prim a few times, then they called it quits. At some point during the article I figured I'd see what they'd done with the Prim domain and found...a fully functional Prim.

At first I thought I had just imagined it had gone under, but apparently not: http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/06/prim-laundry-shuts-down/. Seems strange to not, you know, email your customers again if you decide to resurrect a product.

bunkat• 12 years ago

It doesn't seem like they really did resurrect it. Typing in any zip code results in "Sorry - Prim is not accepting any new customers. Thanks for visiting"

benatkin• 12 years ago

If you try to sign up it says they aren't accepting new customers.

Jmetz1• 12 years ago

Hi All, Jordan, CEO of Washio, here. Happy to answers any questions.

jpatokal• 12 years ago

Did you realize that the article was going to be such a hit piece? And do you agree with his implication that the "laundry space" is bubblier than an overflowing washing machine?

IgorPartola2• 12 years ago

We are living in a time of Great Change, and also a time of Not-So-Great Change. The tidal wave of innovation that has swept out from Silicon Valley, transforming the way we communicate, read, shop, and travel, has carried along with it an epic shit-ton of digital flotsam. Looking around at the newly minted billionaires behind the enjoyable but wholly unnecessary Facebook and WhatsApp, Uber and Nest, the brightest minds of a generation, the high test-scorers and mathematically inclined, have taken the knowledge acquired at our most august institutions and applied themselves to solving increasingly minor First World problems. The marketplace of ideas has become one long late-night infomercial. Want a blazer embedded with GPS technology? A Bluetooth-controlled necklace? A hair dryer big enough for your entire body? They can be yours! In the rush to disrupt everything we have ever known, not even the humble crostini has been spared.

This. It feels like we are just trying to solve the smallest problems that will make us millionaires. With the resources available, why not tackle something a bit more fundamental than laundry?

deciplex4• 12 years ago

Option 1: Split a few hundred developers into groups of 5-10 each, and throw money at them until you generate a few hits (we'll assume hardware costs are negligible because for this group they are). Offer low salaries and 'equity' in return, putting as much risk on the shoulders of your employees as you can - after all, for the successful ones you can always screw them out of their shares later. For now, if you do this at scale, you can be reasonably certain of profitability.

Option 2: Form a single company where you have to manage that entire group toward a single goal, take all the risk, probably pay some non-negligible hardware costs if the problem is interesting enough, etc. Then you either solve the problem or you fail utterly, and even then you still get to find out if anyone really wanted the problem solved in the first place, so you can still fail utterly. Then once you get past that, you can deal with patent trolls and copycats, and for each case you have about 50% probability at best of getting any kind of justice at all.

Option 3: Do the first to fund the second. Sadly there is only one Elon Musk, though.

broabprobe• 12 years ago

Or, instead of making it so those with disposable income no longer have to do laundry, innovate laundry itself so that no one is burdened by laundry.

Making it easier for someone else to do your laundry so you don't have to is not moon-shot innovation. It's not worth doing.

bgilroy26• 12 years ago

Food, clothing, shelter are as fundamental as it gets

lilsunnybee3• 12 years ago

Washing clothes for those with money to spare is not the same as providing clothes for those without. It's tangential rather than fundamental.

gfodor• 12 years ago

You could do a lot worse than laundry. It's something everyone does that takes up a non-trivial amount of time to do. Free up 20-30 minutes a day for millions of people and you are talking about real value.

jorleif• 12 years ago

It may come as a surprise to people who read lots of startup news, because you tend to only hear about the successes, but generally it is not very easy to disrupt any business, or even become a millionaire. Achieving those for e.g. laundry might not make the world a much better place, but it is still quite an achievement.

The other side of this "wholly unnecessary"-business, is that with rising standards of living, necessities are already fairly well provided for, so it is quite obvious that any future desired consumer good will be mostly in the unnecessary category. A funny read about these types of things is "The Idea of Luxury: A Conceptual and Historical Investigation" by Christopher J. Berry, where he describes 18th century philosophers discussing what is luxury (i.e unnecessary) and what is necessity. They end up with a paradoxical example regardning the scant clothing of "savages" (that is non-europeans in warmer climates), and cannot resolve the fact that despite this clothing being really primitive by their standards, it is not strictly necessary for survival, or even most other activities, so they must conclude that even that is just luxury.

IgorPartola2• 12 years ago

But this stuff applies only in the narrow echo chamber of SF, LA, NYC, etc. Fresh water is a necessity, and more people don't have that than will ever be a customer of Washio. I am all for people innovating anything and everything, but let's put things into perps practice: this particular service provides a luxury version of an already luxury service for the richest parts of the world.

lmm5• 12 years ago

If you try to guess what's "fundamental" you run into all the problems of a planned economy. If you stick to what will make you a millionaire then you know you're producing something people actually want, and the invisible hand keeps everything efficient.

gideons• 12 years ago

We have a fairly new bunch of technologies with the internet. We're still at the point where people are exploring the problem space, what our technology can solve, what it can't solve and suggesting future directions. We're looking at the "adjacent possible" to quote Stuart Kauffman.

To put it another way, we have a new tool, all of this is just testing this new tool against the world to see where it works and where it doesn't.

localhost3000• 12 years ago

We've had this in Boston for literally 10 years: Garment Valet (started by Northeastern undergrads as Husky Express). Great service. "Uber for laundry" before Uber. Surprised they weren't mentioned. Nothing new here.

jobial88• 12 years ago

There's another earlier-stage one in NYC that I've used a couple times called LaundryPuppy -- guess they missed out on the article. What I think's interesting about those guys as opposed to Wash.io etc is they partner more closely with specific mom and pop cleaners (more like delivery.com), so the prices feel a bit more reasonable. Also, seems like they ditched the app in favor of SMS, which is sort of unconventional today but actually not terrible for laundry.

ktf• 12 years ago

Reminds me of a real-life version of something from Pynchon's Bleeding Edge -- inching toward parody, but still believable. (In this case, unlike in the novel, because it's actually true...)

“Let’s, Like, Demolish Laundry”

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