How Does Laundry Software Make $60M a Year?
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Why did Alex decide to build a laundry‑tech platform instead of buying laundromats?
I got into it because I wanted to buy laundromats. The more you learn about this industry, the more excited you get, but the more surprised you are of how well it does for the lack of technology. And that's where we decided instead of buying stores, starting to build for them. The custom build hardware is where we both have margin, but it does so much more than just function as a screen and a payment acceptor.
How many of these are in the wild today installed? Two hundred thousand, two hundred fifty thousand some something along those lines. Okay, what's the target for the end of year this year? Do you have a target? A hell of a lot more than than last year's. Uh-huh. Can you double? Can you break one hundred twenty by December this year? Could we? I don't think it's possible. Hey folks, my guest today is Alex Jekowski. He's the co-founder and CEO of Sense.com, a New York-based all-in-one software, hardware, and payments platform, Triple Threat. They are built specifically for the laundry industry. These are laundromats, dry cleaners, and multifamily shared laundry rooms. They bundle POS, online ordering, on machine payment hardware with marketing automation and AI customer service all in one, a big vertical SaaS business.
I mean you are a triple threat integrating all these things into one. Did you start off in hardware or software or payments, or was it all from day one?
The idea when we started the company is there's one way to do this if we want to build a multi-billion dollar business. It's not a point solution. It's not just a point of sale. It's not like we have to be the all in one. And the beauty of vertical SAS, right? It's a smaller market. We should have higher penetration higher penetration. Higher retention and higher attachment rates to all the products you deploy going forward, right? So we started with the point of sale because software is easier than hardware uh from an iteration perspective, from a deployment perspective, from a hiring perspective, from a cost perspective. Uh, so we started a core product with a point of sale as we were building the hardware.
Then we commercialized the hardware in kind of late 2022, early 2023, uh, and then realized, damn, this hardware thing really hard. Uh and while we made, you know, a couple million dollars of sales and we were pouring a lot of money into the effort, realized best way to de-risk and accelerate uh that execution was potentially through MA. And that's what led us to kind of buying a business in twenty twenty four that accelerated a lot of our hardware growth.
How did Cents land its first 73‑location operator and scale to the first hundred customers?
Alex, take us back to day one. When did you guys write the first line of code for the business?
I always mark like when did I take the first risk of going full time? That was around October, November of 2020. I got into it because I wanted to buy laundromats. Um after I sold my last company, heard I wanted to open a bar and you meet enough people that own bars who say maybe not the thing to do. While it didn't end up being the bar, it was I was I was most interested in the laundromat space. The more I learned about it, found stores I wanted to buy. And the more you learn about this industry, the more excited you get, but the more surprised you are of how well it does for the lack of technology. And that's where we decided instead of buying stores, starting to build for them. And so that was probably, you know, 2019 first line of code.
You know, a lot of people in AI right now are saying, What's the AI hedge? Go buy shit AI can't replace. Why didn't you actually go roll up laundry mats?
When I was looking at buying stores, I was hell bent on buying those stores. I was had LOIs for three locations. I was like all in, biz buy, sell the whole, the whole nine. It was the function of I have a relatively sizable earnout at a company I that just acquired my business. Like I need to be able to do this with the least amount of effort possible. I'm sophisticated enough. I should be able to implement the right systems. That meant I didn't have to go handle a metric ton of quarters on a monthly basis.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
Why did Alex decide to build a laundry‑tech platform instead of buying laundromats?
0:00–2:10
2
How did Cents land its first 73‑location operator and scale to the first hundred customers?
2:10–4:29
3
What role does custom‑built hardware play in Cents’ revenue and margin model?
4:29–7:07
4
Why did Cents acquire a hardware company rather than continue building everything in‑house?
7:07–9:17
5
How did Cents achieve 99% customer retention and $750 k revenue per employee?
9:17–11:13
6
What were the strategic considerations behind the $140 M Series C and the $30 M employee tender?
11:13–13:16
7
How does Alex view valuation, optionality, and exit strategy for a vertical SaaS business?
13:16–15:56
8
Where can talent apply to join Cents and help expand the laundry‑tech ecosystem?
15:56–17:54
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