Ajay Prakash
speaker
105 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Jan 2025
Ajay Prakash’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
You really have to maintain a lot of excitement and conviction to weather all the storms in the journey.
Well, I mean, first, it was a critical piece of understanding whether we want to take the leap. And there's a lot of people who will kind of build the product and they don't want to show it till it's perfect. What you need when you start a company, especially consumer facing, is velocity to insights. You got to move as fast as possible to figure out if anyone cares.
I don't know if anything surprised us. The biggest thing overall was... people were really excited. And so we knew we were striking a chord and there was something there where people actually cared about what we were building. And I remember James saying for him, one of the big aha moments was, People actually paid us. We didn't do this for free.
We charged them that cost, so we didn't make money, but they actually paid us for the service that we literally took a week or two to kind of get set up. But what we did is we learned a lot in the process. We tested morning, we tested evening, we tested during the day. And as an example there, if you're five minutes late in the morning,
you're ruining someone's day because they got to get out the door. If you're five minutes late in the evening, nobody cares. And so there were little insights like that that were really helpful. But the biggest thing was, do people want this? Is this actually solving a pain point? And then kind of learning in that testing, what are some of the things we need to really nail?
Like, oh, that experience at the door for the valet is important. Oh, when you take, like I found, we had a bunch of random laundry bags and we picked up people's clothes and we wrote their name on a piece of paper and the service type and we threw it in there. And I found after two or three customers, I couldn't remember whose bag was who.
So it gave us the sense of like, wow, this is operationally gonna become really complicated. And so you gotta build the systems to be able to manage that. And those, those were little nuggets we learned early on, but the biggest thing was, Hey, people really want this. This is exciting. And so that kind of led us into that need finding and the journey to say, okay, let's go build this.
It has been rinsed since after that test. And I'll tell you, you know, I had experience at the time with consumer startups, with the last startup I was at, and also with a lot of the on-demand companies that were coming out.
What we found was there were companies that were, you know, either spelling a word wrong, like Lyft, you know, Lyft with a Y. That's the only company I think that survived that. But there was a company called Ship with a Y, and there was a bunch of those. Or there was a lot of .io's or .ly's.
The vision here has always been to build a household name, to build a national brand, to build a durable company. And I had spent years in consulting and private equity working with great companies, and I had seen that. And so it was really important for us to find a word that worked. And so we did the search around what's going to be the core root word. Is it wash? Is it press? Is it fold?
And we found that actually there were a lot of domain names available. with Rince at the time. Rince.com was not yet available. But what we did was we, in the test, we called it Rince Me. That was just like a placeholder. And we got feedback from people that that wasn't a very good name. The URL originally, when we launched in May 2013, uh, was rinsed now.com.
That's where we put a landing page up, but we were really, you know, after we knew we were going to do this, James and I went back and forth a lot on this. Could we create the name without the domain name, but it was all in service of this brand that could become a national brand and a household name. So yeah,
So we were very intentional about calling it Rinse, about making it a word, about making it something that actually made sense. And then shortly after we launched, we actually were able to acquire Rinse.com. And that was an investment where we said, hey, that's a no brainer because we're not trying to be the biggest dry cleaner or laundromat in Pacific Heights.
We're trying to be a national and global brand. And so we got to make those investments up front.
Yeah, absolutely. You can sign up at rinse.com. You can download the mobile app. If you're an existing customer, you press one button on the mobile app or you text the letter Y and then our valets who are all W2 employees will come to your door between 8pm and 10pm and they will pick up your clothes. If you're a new customer, you get personalized rinse bags.
And if you're an existing customer, you already have those bags. We'll pick them up. We'll take them, we'll do a bunch of stuff with them. And I'll tell you about that in a second. But then the plan is we'll just bring them back to you. If it's laundry, it's next day. If you pay for next day service, otherwise it's in a few days and it's folded.
If it's laundry, if it's hanging and pressed, if it's a dry cleaning. On the operation side, it's pretty complex. You know, I think the way we look at this space and this industry is that getting started, the barriers to entry, pretty easy, right? James and I did it within the first week or two of talking about it, but the barriers to scale are very high. because there's so much complexity.
So what our valets will do is they'll pick it up, they'll bring it back. We have a central hub in all of our markets. We're in 10 major markets across the country right now. And then we work with local cleaners to clean the clothes. And for us, there's always been an element here of wanting to help local cleaners grow their business and being very thorough and saying, hey,
There are good cleaners out there and bad cleaners out there. We're going to work with the best cleaners and let them do what they do best, which is clean the clothes. And then we'll take care of everything else. We're going to help them grow their business. So we get them the clothes to clean. They have rinse technology and rinse processes in their facilities.
They'll clean the clothes, bring them back to us, and then our valets will deliver them when the clothes are ready.
Showing 41–60 of 105 · page 3 of 6
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