Why we’re building NoScrubs laundry delivery (noscrubs.io)
With the explosion of on-demand services we all know of now for food/grocery/rides/retail, isn’t it surprising that there’s no household name in laundry delivery?
I first started thinking about this problem a few years ago when I used a somewhat well-known laundry service. I had a small amount of laundry to do, but was in the process of moving from LA to Austin and wanted to outsource that chore. The service was okay, but it took 4 days from pickup to return and cost $50. Slow and expensive — a true luxury service.
This experience perplexed me — why would it take 4 days and cost so much for one load of laundry? The answer is that most services use centralized locations to do the laundry. This adds distance, order queueing, and delays that make it impossible to be much faster. Secondly, the CapEx they need to outlay to pay for vehicles, space, and physical machines makes the price to the consumer exorbitant.
I had a washer/dryer attached to my building — why couldn’t they use that and create a faster, more affordable service?
Having worked at Instacart (along with one of my cofounders), I knew that the last mile distance was by far the largest cost driver for any delivery company (~80% of cost per delivery). I realized there’s a model that can slash last mile costs AND Capex, resulting in the fastest, most affordable customer experience possible in laundry.
Why start it in Austin?
In addition to launching the Austin market in 2014 for Instacart, I came back in 2015 to show that we could make the market profitable. When I arrived for the project, we were losing about $15 on every order. Within four months, with a lot of tinkering and a huge team effort, we were able to turn a $4 contribution margin on every order (without raising prices!). It was the first time an Instacart market generated positive contribution margin at scale — obviously a crucial proof point for the long term viability of the company.
Instacart Horseback Deliveries for Austin launch, May 2014
We chose Austin to run “Project Lonestar” because Austin has representative geography to the majority of major cities in the US (LA / NYC / SF all have very nuanced geographies).
Fast forward a decade and Austin has grown a lot. It also happens to be a robotic-friendly market another inevitable technology that is going to make everyone’s lives easier, the environment greener, and the roads less congested.
Where do we go from here?
Our goal at NoScrubs is to eliminate the chore of laundry. Americans spend billions of wasted hours per year on a chore that’s been complained about for 4000 years.
In a Sumerian poem from around 2100 BCE, a woman complains about the difficulty of doing laundry:
“I am tired of washing clothes,
I am tired of scrubbing clothes,
I am tired of beating clothes on the rocks.”
By creating a laundry delivery service that a) as fast as doing it yourself b) anyone can afford and c) better quality than doing it yourself, we know there’s a massive market for our value prop. We have a few wrinkles (never in your laundry, only in our blog posts 🙂), in our operating model that allow us to be uniquely fast, cheap, and high quality. We plan on being the next technology company that democratizes a previously premium service (Uber > private drivers, Instacart > personal shoppers).
We’re thrilled to be doing it in Austin and excited for you to try it. New customers get 50% off their first month at noscrubs.io.