SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Uber for Laundry did $200k last year. Can this be a $10/year business?
25 Jan 2023
Chapter 1: What is SaaS Open and why is it important for the SaaS community?
Guys, SaaS Open is our next big event in New York City. March 16th and 17th, we'll have a thousand SaaS leaders all sharing how they built their companies. Our keynotes are Henry Shuck, Marie Martins from Tally.sao, Serby from Symbol, Christopher of DocHub, who had a big exit.
Again, hundreds of speakers, a thousand plus attendees, and we've got folks bringing their entire executive teams because we have stages for founders, heads of product, head of finance and BD, CMOs and CROs, and then people in HR stage. It's going to be special. Prices are increasing every week, so you don't want to wait.
Go to sasopen.com right now to see what the ticket price is and lock in your spot today. Again, that's sasopen.com, March 16th and 17th in New York City. Tickets are almost sold out. You are listening to Conversations with Nathan Latka, where I sit down and interview the top SaaS founders, like Eric Wan from Zoom. If you'd like to subscribe, go to getlatka.com.
We've published thousands of these interviews, and if you want to sort through them quickly by revenue or churn, CAC, valuation, or other metrics, the easiest way to do that is to go to getlatka.com and use our filtering tool. It's like a big Excel sheet for all of these podcast interviews. Check it out right now And they were doing about $12,000 a month when she came in and took over.
She's repositioning the company, trying to drive some extra growth here. They ran out of funding before she joined. And now relying on SEO strategies door-to-door in Utah to sign up these customers. Aiming to raise $750,000 on a seed round. I call it a $3 million cap. We'll see what happens. Hey folks, my guest today is Jennifer Meyer.
She's the CEO of Laundra, a seasoned entrepreneur and business leader who is for the first time running a SaaS company. She's a goddess of networking and business development, which is the perfect combination for the startup, which is like Uber for Laundry. Jennifer, are you ready to take us to the top? I am. All right. Uber for Laundry. What does that mean? And is it B2C or B2B?
It's both. But essentially, if you have a laundry need, so if you want someone to do your laundry, there's someone out there who's willing to do it for you. So like Uber, if somebody needs a ride, there's somebody out there who has a car who's willing to give you a ride.
And what geographies do you cover currently?
Currently, we're available in all 50 states. We have had signups in all 50 states, but we are targeting, we have clusters of customers in a number of places around the US. We're based in Idaho, so that's where we started. So we have some in Idaho and in Utah and the Wasatch Front. We have some customers in Santa Rosa, California, Denver, Montana, around Houston, Texas.
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Chapter 2: Who is Jennifer Meyer and what is Laundra?
Is it like gallons or something like that?
Yeah, 10 gallons. The small one is more like a kitchen garbage bag. And it would do about laundry for two people for a week.
That's like a small, like 15 gallons.
Yeah. 13, 13 gallons is I think the, the kitchen one. And I can't remember what the, um, the other one is, but it's more like the large, uh, outdoor garden bags, the big 30 gallons. Yes. Yeah.
Okay. Interesting. And that's like a family of four or something.
Yeah. That would do about a family of four for a week. Yeah. And the small bag is $30 and a large bag is 50.
Okay. And that's all in?
All in. Not including tips if you want to tip your washer.
So break down the economics on that. If I'm a family of four and I want to use Launder.com, again, guys, it's L-O-N-D-R.com. Jennifer, of the $50 I pay for my large 30-gallon bag, how much of that will go to the washer versus how much does Launder get to keep?
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Chapter 3: How does Laundra operate as an Uber-like service for laundry?
Where's the majority of your customers today?
I believe the majority of them are here in Idaho, but we do have consistent customers in California, Kansas, Texas. I think those are probably where we've got the majority of our consistent every week customers.
And of the hundred loads you did over the past 30 days, is that a one-to-one ratio? So one customer is equal to one load or can one customer do two loads in the same month?
Yeah, we've actually have... The higher volume is actually tied to our commercial clients. So for example, we have a couple of chiropractors and they do two or three loads of laundry with us a week. And we also have property managers who do short-term property rentals like Airbnb. who we just do their laundry for them on a turnover.
Interesting. So how many unique customers make up the 100 loads per month?
We probably have about 30 customers.
Okay. Really interesting. How did you... I mean, that's the story here, right? When did you launch the business? What year?
So the business was launched in early 2020 and I was not part of that early launch. There were two co-founders and they were able to get a seed investment from a family member. And with that, they were able to build the two apps, the customer app, the washer app, and then also an admin app. This is all in 2020, right? And 2020 and through 2021.
When was the seed round closed and how much was the seed round?
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Chapter 4: What challenges does Laundra face in building its marketplace?
We're just doing organic searches on our website. Organic searches for laundry services near me.
This is a very competitive space though. There's, I mean, there are a lot of apps doing tens of millions in revenue in this space. How do you outrank them? And what are those keywords you outrank them for?
Well, it's, It's curious that you mentioned that because there are companies who do laundry services, but they're not a peer-to-peer, right? Like an Uber of an individual and an individual, right? There may be a company that does wash and fold and maybe they have a delivery service or you've got dry cleaners or laundromats, right? And yes, it is a hugely saturated market.
But what is not saturated is the online market for laundry only of door to door. There's really only a handful of companies in the country that There are actually other countries who are in a similar, but there's probably about five of us who have any kind of market share, existing market share.
But Jennifer, how do you beat a Bolt Laundry, which has 1,300 reviews, a five-star rating, or Hamper App, which has 98,000 reviews? These guys rank number one and number two for the search term laundry services near me. I want to understand how you are going to take these folks down with your creativity.
Right. So Hamper app is actually not like us. They are actually a connector. They are almost a third party connector. So they'll connect the customer to somebody else that will do the laundry. They won't. They're not actually facilitating the. the direct competition. So the competitive advantage there is pricing because we'll be able to control that price.
Whereas they are essentially, it's a third party. It's like an Expedia, for example.
But how do you out... My point is, how do you outrank them? If the keyword you're leaning on is laundry services near me, it doesn't matter really because no customer will know about you if you don't at least get in the keyword ranking. So how do you just get in the rankings in the top 5?
Well, you've got to spend some money on SEO and some marketing. That's going to help a ton. But what our competitive advantage is going to be is we're actually a purpose-driven company. And our goal is to make a community of people. Because unlike Uber, Uber, you might never see the same driver again.
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Chapter 5: How does Laundra's pricing structure work for customers?
I get it. You're different and you're not the same, but if they don't find you, it's useless.
Right. Well, part of that's going to be marketing. And like I told you, we've had zero marketing spend in the last couple of years.
But you can't really spend to beat someone on SEO. That takes a lot of time more than anything else. And it takes domain authority getting above 70, 80, 90 in terms of DR rank. So I feel like this would be very hard to beat the legacy players on SEO. But I bet there's some other creative strategies you've already used to sign up these 30 customers. Tell us a couple of those stories.
Do you door knock in Utah? I mean, how do you get them?
Yeah. A lot of our local customers were door knocking, but the customers that we have in, it's interesting. Actually, the most effective marketing we did was having a local news station talk about us. And we had the highest hits from that. So it's going to be just getting visibility, getting in front of people.
Yeah. Okay. That makes a lot of sense. And if you're at 5,000 bucks a month today in revenue, where were you exactly one year ago? Do you remember?
I don't because I was not yet with the company, but we were actually at that point, they were just kind of at the end of their funding and they were just beginning to ramp up. And they were at about at this time a year ago, they had finally ramped up to around $12,000 a month over a four month period from about five to seven, nine.
So you guys have shrunk a bunch then over the past 12 months. What happened?
There's a natural attrition rate. And this is universal with actually all of our competitors as well.
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Chapter 6: What is Laundra's current revenue and growth strategy?
That's amazing. Okay. And do you mind me asking how old you are?
No, I'm 50.
Okay. Last question. Something you wish you knew when you were 20 years old.
How to code.
Guys, there you have it. The founders of Launder.com. It's a B2B. They'll help you do your loads of laundry service, chiropractors, property managers that need sheets done every week, things like that. Now, she just joined actually about a year ago. They're now doing $5,000 a month in revenue from 30 customers. They did $200,000 total last year.
And they were doing about $12,000 a month when she came in and took over. She's repositioning the company, trying to drive some extra growth here. They ran out of funding before she joined. And now relying on SEO strategies door-to-door in Utah to sign up these customers. Aiming to raise $750,000 on a seed round that caught a $3 million cap. We'll see what happens.
Jennifer, thanks for taking us to the top.
Thank you so much. I appreciate it.
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