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Driving a car is currently specialised, as is folding laundry. The opportunity for autonomous vehicles is clear; you can start with replacing the cost of paying
by jfoster 9y ago
Driving a car is currently specialised, as is folding laundry. The opportunity for autonomous vehicles is clear; you can start with replacing the cost of paying every person around the world who drives for a living with profit equivalent to their income. (likely at somewhat less than 100% efficiency, but who cares because of the massive scale?)
The next bit would be converting private trips into automated rides; replacing car ownership. The unit profits will decrease as part of this effort, but the opportunity is again huge.
How will you monetise laundry folding automation? At best you can replace just some of the people at all the commercial laundries and turn that into profit, but many laundries may hire one person who does everything. For home use you could sell a machine, but how much would you need to charge for it for that to equal recurring revenue from autonomous vehicles and how much are people willing to pay for a laundry robot? (even robotic vacuums are still quite niche despite probably being more convenient and costing less than LaundryBot)
- zghst 9y agoLaundry bot would make no money, I think. People are happy to do this task on their own or via a maid.
- bpicolo 9y agoLaundry bot would definitely make money, tons of it. Robo maid is like numero uno on things people have historically wished robots would do in the future
- veidr 9y agoYep, I paid around $2000 for a nice Hitachi drum-type washer-dryer machine last year. I would certainly, without any hesitation whatsoever, have been willing to pay $5000 or even a bit more for one that, instead of just washing and drying all our clothes, took a pile of dirty clothes as input and output a few stacks of washed, dried, folded, and sorted clothes. Anybody with children would want this; those who also have sufficient money would buy it.
- mrfusion 9y agoIt would be simpler to invent wrinkle free clothes and convince your wife clothes don't need to be sorted.
- zghst 9y agoBefore the invention of modern washing and drying machines, sure. But today many people in big cities don't even have an washer and dryer in their home or may not have one in the building, this problem spans many different use cases of how people consume the service. I'd consider asking things like: * Is the barrier higher and value lower because they have laundry in their unit or does the value increase marginally because they have in the building, or is it more lucrative because they don't have laundry at all? * And does a solution scale easily across these different use cases? * The ability to provide continuity on even a pure software scale makes this a particularly pricey arena to enter because a person is required to fulfill this service. To find ways to make this economical, we'd have to consider co-opting existing behaviors or economic patterns. Are there _multiple_ existing patterns that we can enhance?
- ams6110 9y ago> replacing the cost of paying every person around the world who drives for a living with profit equivalent to their income That's not how it works, because your competitors will undercut you. Then you will undercut them, and continue the race to the bottom until the natural price is reached.
- jfoster 9y agoThe efficiency will certainly be a lot less than 100%, and it does seem likely that at least two companies might bring the tech to market within a couple of years of each other. I think whatever the starting price point is, there will probably be so much of a demand/supply gap that the initial price point will hold for a number of years.