We have been patiently following this new trend coined as ‘Uber for X’ catering to users who want different services on demand. Our generation has no patience and demands things to be done with great urgency. This is the reason for so many on-demand services popping up and doing well across various cities in India.
On-demand is the future of businesses for delivering goods and services. We already get video streaming on demand – Apalya, cabs are available on-demand (Uber, OlaCabs, TaxiForSure); even our grocery is on-demand – BigBasket or Zopnow. I haven’t used the service yet but there is an astrology on-demand service as well. What about an on-demand laundry service then?
MyWash is Bangalore-based on-demand laundry service launched a month ago. The startup sends its delivery boys to pick up clothes, gets them washed and sends it back within 2 days. Its services are giving customers ease as the team gets their laundry done quickly without any significant efforts. The team has been running operations for the past 25 days and has successfully completed 300 orders.
Though laundry services are unorganized, they are very comfort driven market. You won’t give your clothes to the next-door laundry ‘walla bhaiya’ if you know he doesn’t do the laundry well. Mywash is trying to organize these laundry guys and providing ease to customers. Their current user-flow is very easy and doesn’t need any formal customer onboarding.
Founders of the Bangalore-based startup, Silus Reddy, Balaji Ashok Kumar and Raghu believe that they would be able to acquire more users in the coming days and keep a check on quality as well. The team has been involved in startups earlier, and is well acquainted with the perils of scaling up a startup. Currently, Silus has taken up the marketing front, Raghu takes care of the product and tech while Balaji is their design concierge. Silus and Raghu have know each other from their college days at BITS Pilani while Balaji was a Young India Fellow in Delhi. This team looks promising because of their speed of execution and stress on quality. They have planned and started operations in merely 2 months after their idea phase, which is commendable given the market they operate in.
Asked on what really made them to startup, Silus Reddy shares,
Laundry has always been a problem. When I was studying at BITS Pilani, we always had a dhobi coming once every week, take our clothes, and deliver them back (though the quality was just about ok). We never felt the wrath of doing our own laundry until I started my professional career in Bangalore. I had to go to the shops in the peak traffic hours to get my laundry done. There has to be a better way to get laundry done. In the days when house can be found at tap of a button, groceries can be ordered in a tap of button, we couldn’t find one good laundry service. So my friends and me started working on this and the result is MyWash.in
Today, people tend to do their laundry on weekends but even that is a pain to most as that’s the only available time to rest during the week. Laundry guys are facing challenges fixing pickup and deliveries times and often have to waste a lot of resources on this. Another big problem is that a customer will never compromise on quality. Silus said,
We did enough research about the laundry industry, spoke with industry experts and came up with a set of essential guidelines, “MyWash Partner Guidelines” for our partner laundromats to meet. We advice them on the guidelines and do a constant and timely inspections to make sure they maintain the quality and any point of time. Failure to meet the standards will not be tolerated. We take pride in maintaining high standards.
In simple words, Mywash is offering laundry & dry cleaning services at the tap of a button. As soon as you ‘Schedule a Wash’ on the website, pickup guy is at your doorstep to collect clothes for laundry and dry cleaning and returns them clean and ironed within a day or two. There’s an added level of ease for a user which allows him/her to pickup the laundry during suitable pickup and drop-off time slots.
In last few years, apart from being cost-sensitive we have become impatient and now expect on-demand services across many sectors. Pricing is the most important parameter that makes or breaks startups these days. Mywash charges customers Rs.19 and upwards per cloth, a very competitive pricing given the services allotted per order. The team is giving Rs. 100 off on every order above Rs. 200, a marketing gimmick to acquire customers quickly.
Speaking further about pricing, Silus mentions,
We have churn rate of less than 5% which proves a lot of things about our service and pricing. At present, we operate on a pay per use model, and our charges start from as little as Rs. 19 per cloth. Within the first 20 days of our launch we got 1000+ signups and 10,000+ eyeballs. We are introduction subscription packages very soon.
People have been paying others to do their laundry for them for decades and centuries. According to the recent report by KPMG, the organized laundry market in India is currently around Rs 5,000 crore while the unorganized one is estimated to be around Rs. 2,00,000 crores. To add this is the convenience factor that gives users ease to place an order without any much hassle. The working population in Bangalore is about 65 lakhs and each one on an average spends abut Rs.500 on laundry every month, this makes Bangalore market alone worth about half a billion dollars.
Times are changing, we travel more in cabs these days instead of the auto, and the age-old industries are evolving. There is no reason for the same evolution to be expected in laundry market very soon. As of now Mywash covers entire Bangalore and is growing at 50% week-on-week. Their average order size is also increasing on day-to-day basis but interesting fact to notice is the churn rate of less than 5%. Considering the huge opportunity in the laundry market, the team wants to expand their presence to the major metros by December 2015 and then scale their operations in each of these cities by 2016/17.
Read more : How this another Indian on-demand laundry startup is creating its niche
The team is actively looking for funding to fuel presence in Bangalore and expansion plans. They still have to build efficient and reliable logistics network coupled with their technology to improve their delivery times across various areas of Bangalore.
On-demand services or ‘Uber for X’ is a fresh emerging trend riding the next wave of so called innovation in India with dozens of startups doing some exciting use cases. For example, Grofers is doing hyper logistics, Loginext is into logistics analytics, and Alok Jain has started Yumist to cater to the on-demand food needs of people.
We are bullish that these online-demand services will work, are you?
Website: MyWash.in