Nate Andorsky has been working to clean up D.C. for years.
Andorsky founded a company to help college students find dorm room cleaners not long after graduating from George Washington University in 2010. Since then, he's expanded his vision with his latest startup, ScrubBud, a platform that he thinks could change the whole residential cleaning market by building reliable digital portals for cleaning companies.
"It takes skill to do a great job cleaning a home," Andorsky said. "But it's just very hard to scale a cleaning company."
ScrubBud caters to cleaning companies that may be very good at their job but lack the kind of digital presence that drives so much of the urban service economy in the U.S. these days.
ScrubBud has been a work in progress since 2013, but has mainly been under the radar while Andorsky and his co-founders worked at digital services agency called Creative Science Labs. The ScrubBud platform officially launched in May and now has a dozen local companies listed for hire at this point. The plan now is to raise a $750,000 seed round to build up the number of companies using ScrubBud's services.
The focus of the company is using standardized templates to build websites for the cleaning companies that make the direct interface between them and their clients as easy as possible. The website creation service is free, but ScrubBud takes a 10 percent fee for each booking made over the platform. As the company grows, Andorsky said the specifics of the business model may change, but he believes its a fair price for the management, communication and general Web presence that ScrubBud offers.
While ScrubBud has a consumer-facing platform, Andorsky said ScrubBud is not trying to compete with companies like Handy, which function as a central platforms for people looking for home services. ScrubBud will be mostly invisible to consumers, who will see just the individual page of the company they are hiring.
"The customer side of residential cleaning services is crowded, but there's nothing out there that integrates the entire cycle like we do," Andorsky said. "It's the recommendations that matter to these businesses."
"We've got users, we've got revenue, now we can start to scale up."
"We've spent most of our time at CSL on ScrubBud but it's all been incognito," said ScrubBud CEO Nate Andorsky. "CSL funded us to this point but now we're ready to spin off. We've got users, we've got revenue, now we can start to scale up."
Building this kind of company in D.C. is logical, Andorsky said, because of the nature of the cleaning market as much as the tech scene.
"D.C. is ripe for this," Andorsky said. "There are high net worth areas, families where both parents are working. These are people who need cleaning services."
"D.C. is ripe for this."
And of course, there is a lot of money to be made in the world of residential cleaning."
"It's a $4.2 billion industry in the U.S.," Andorsky said. "And 96 percent of cleaning services have five employees or less. The market is very fragmented and we can give these mom and pop shops access to a lot of new customers."
