Fix a problem you know well, take on a big market where you can scale and be bold with your ideas.
Those are a few themes you're likely to hear from a lot of startup mentors and advisers. And it seems that newly launched on-demand laundry service startup NoScrubs is locked into all those concepts.
It's fixing a problem that its founders have studied through the years — making laundry easier. Its founders have plenty of experience in delivery and logistics after helping launch Instacart's grocery delivery service in Austin. Its market is nearly boundless: anyone willing to pay to get their laundry done quickly. And its bold idea is that eventually delivery robots will make its on-demand laundry services even faster, cheaper and friendlier to the environment.
Matthew O'Connor, who was Instacart's city launcher in Austin back in 2014 and 2015, co-founded NoScrubs with Matt Goff, a longtime program manager at Instacart, and Sudhanshu Gautam, who worked with O'Connor at his other startup, AdQuick.
After operating quietly with early customers, NoScrubs is now launching across most of the city. Its laundry service differentiates from many others with speed. It can typically pick up a few loads of laundry from your house, wash them at a nearby laundromat or partnering facility and have them back to the owner in under three hours. For now, NoScrubs is only available in Austin. The company plans to scale across other Texas cities in the future before expanding nationally and internationally.
O'Connor said that it's a big improvement from the three to four days that many services require, largely because they typically wash everything at one facility that may be far from customers' homes. The startup, which is launching with a 50% discount for first-time customers, provides two pickups per month for up to 40 pounds of laundry for $59. Customers can schedule their pickups anytime online.
NoScrubs has thus far been bootstrapped by its founding team, but it is in the process of closing a pre-seed funding round, O'Connor said.
The startup currently hires contractors to do most of the pickups, drop-offs and laundry work. While that work can be somewhat fleeting, NoScrubs offers contractors a stake in the company. That means that if NoScrubs one day goes public or is sold at a higher value, those early contractors will benefit.
O'Connor said that perk comes from seeing so many early Instacart shoppers who helped drive the company's value miss out on the financial upside when Instacart went public last year.
"There was no upside, really, for the people doing the shopping," he said. "I think when you look at the last decade of the gig economy, one of the regrets of those growth stories is that the Uber drivers, Instacart shoppers ... could have had life-changing equity."
O'Connor sees that equity as a win-win for the company and its contractors.
"People who really have a high level of ownership are going to stick around with us longer and really go even further above and beyond," he said.
Someday, however, NoScrubs hopes to begin to transition to robotic deliveries. Bots have been tested to deliver food, such as Chick-fil-A, and other goods in Austin, and O'Connor said he's already had early discussions with robotic companies about future bots that might be suitable for laundry delivery. It's unclear when that might happen, but the growth of robotics startups and testing projects in Austin is one of the reasons he and his co-founders decided to start here.
"I think it's a matter of 'crawl, walk, run' with the cities, making sure they're safe and efficient, and seem to be getting checked every single day," he said. "So I see them being relatively nationwide within a few years."
One of the biggest surprises for O'Connor since beginning to work with early customers is that NoScrubs isn't just being used by wealthy individuals.
"I would have expected sort of a millennial professional, convenience-only type of demographic early on," he said. "But what we've seen is we have across the spectrum on age, mid-20s to late-60s, at houses and apartments. And one sort of heartwarming and exciting piece is that there are a lot of people that had trouble physically with laundry. They may have a bad back or trouble lifting it or another complication ... so it's been really nice to be able to help them."
