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I'm not a car owner so I have no stake in this fight but I feel the need to rebut some of the claims: * Anything is low margin if you provide a commodity. By b

I'm not a car owner so I have no stake in this fight but I feel the need to rebut some of the claims: * Anything is low margin if you provide a commodity. By being a car washer, the only people you see are people getting their car washed. What you don't see is people who need to get their car washed but don't. Some proportion of those people don't because the existing interfaces are too difficult to use. I just used a pathjoy recently to clean my apartment and I was willing to pay a premium to use them because I have no idea how to otherwise find a good house cleaner. * Staffing is hard but I think you exaggerate how hard it is. Lyft has managed to solve this problem successfully and I would argue Exec has as well so this is at least two existence proofs. Postmates and Instacart also seem to have solved this problem but I haven't had enough datapoints to confirm. I think what a lot of companies in this space are unaware of is that, no matter what problem you ostensibly solve, you are also ultimately solving how to scalably acquire talent. I think one thing that has helped immensely over the last 4 years is that the recession has created a pool of under/unemployed resourceful people that these startups are now capitalizing on. * Proper incentive structures can trivially solve the cancellation problem. Just charge a cancellation fee if you cancel within an hour of cleaning. * Some people are going to be fucktards the best way to deal with it is to just treat it as a statistical phenomena and price it into your model. There are lots of things you can do to bias the natural level of fraud but, anecdotally, companies I've talked to seem to report that just "has to own a smartphone" is enough to cut fraud by a significant amount. * Barring certain mathematical proofs, it's impossible to prove that a startup won't work, only that it hasn't yet. The reason to spend $5M is that if you discover a way that it could work that nobody else had the patience/foresight to discover, it could be worth many multiples of that.

orangethirty 14y ago
* Anything is low margin if you provide a commodity. By being a car washer, the only people you see are people getting their car washed. What you don't see is people who need to get their car washed but don't. Some proportion of those people don't because the existing interfaces are too difficult to use. I just used a pathjoy recently to clean my apartment and I was willing to pay a premium to use them because I have no idea how to otherwise find a good house cleaner.* People who don't wash their cars just don't care enough about their cars to wash them. That's it. Also, finding a good house cleaner is not the same as a good car washer. You can stroll into a tunnel type car wash any day of the week and not have to worry about a thing. Having a stranger come into your home to clean is really stressful. Congrats on finding a good service provider for that. shalmanese 2 hours ago | link | parent | flag I'm not a car owner so I have no stake in this fight but I feel the need to rebut some of the claims: * Anything is low margin if you provide a commodity. By being a car washer, the only people you see are people getting their car washed. What you don't see is people who need to get their car washed but don't. Some proportion of those people don't because the existing interfaces are too difficult to use. I just used a pathjoy recently to clean my apartment and I was willing to pay a premium to use them because I have no idea how to otherwise find a good house cleaner. * Staffing is hard but I think you exaggerate how hard it is. Lyft has managed to solve this problem successfully and I would argue Exec has as well so this is at least two existence proofs. Postmates and Instacart also seem to have solved this problem but I haven't had enough datapoints to confirm.* Have you ever had a car washing business? How did you fare with finding a good staff? * Proper incentive structures can trivially solve the cancellation problem. Just charge a cancellation fee if you cancel within an hour of cleaning.* Oh charge a fee you say? How do you think I will do that? Credit card? Then I have to deal with chargebacks and lose even more money than not doing anything. Mail them an invoice? Not going to work. Please provide some insight into this because I do want to learn how you would do this. * Some people are going to be fucktards the best way to deal with it is to just treat it as a statistical phenomena and price it into your model. There are lots of things you can do to bias the natural level of fraud but, anecdotally, companies I've talked to seem to report that just "has to own a smartphone" is enough to cut fraud by a significant amount.* My model could only be priced at a given rate because of competition. By pricing in fucktards I would be pricing myself out of non-fucktards. * Barring certain mathematical proofs, it's impossible to prove that a startup won't work, only that it hasn't yet. The reason to spend $5M is that if you discover a way that it could work that nobody else had the patience/foresight to discover, it could be worth many multiples of that.* You are right. But it does not take 5.25 million dollars to prove that Cherry would not work. Just a couple of thousands to test at a local market. In fact, most startups these days don't need millions of dollars to prove their business model. They just need thousands, not millions. Thats why YC only gives people a small bit of money as seed. They know that there is no need to spend that much. Where you do need money is to scale the operations and that varies a lot from business to business. Cherry would have been able to scale without much money, because they did not do anything themselves (the sub contracted the work). I do appreciate that you took the time to reply, but I have real world experience with this, whereas you only are speculating while using Silicon Valley startup logic to it. Doesn't apply (hardly ever, actually).
- visualcsharp 14y ago
  Thank you for injecting reality into the discussion. I couldn't care less whether one's post is angry-sounding, upset-sounding, careless-sounding, etc.; I don't read HN for emotional support. I do read it for posts like yours.
- rprasad 14y ago
  Agreed; it's always annoying when people with no experience in an industry claim that sketchy startup logic will somehow overcome real-world problems that have vexed businesses for decades (or longer). Employment, fraud, and customer development are all very difficult business problems, which is why so many companies have IPO'd by making them the slightest bit easier (i.e., Monster, Paypal, Salesforce). By the way, visualcsharp, you've been dead for the past 16 days (at least). A review of your comments doesn't explain why, so you probably annoyed a moderator.

orangethirty 14y ago

* Anything is low margin if you provide a commodity. By being a car washer, the only people you see are people getting their car washed. What you don't see is people who need to get their car washed but don't. Some proportion of those people don't because the existing interfaces are too difficult to use. I just used a pathjoy recently to clean my apartment and I was willing to pay a premium to use them because I have no idea how to otherwise find a good house cleaner.* People who don't wash their cars just don't care enough about their cars to wash them. That's it. Also, finding a good house cleaner is not the same as a good car washer. You can stroll into a tunnel type car wash any day of the week and not have to worry about a thing. Having a stranger come into your home to clean is really stressful. Congrats on finding a good service provider for that. shalmanese 2 hours ago | link | parent | flag I'm not a car owner so I have no stake in this fight but I feel the need to rebut some of the claims: * Anything is low margin if you provide a commodity. By being a car washer, the only people you see are people getting their car washed. What you don't see is people who need to get their car washed but don't. Some proportion of those people don't because the existing interfaces are too difficult to use. I just used a pathjoy recently to clean my apartment and I was willing to pay a premium to use them because I have no idea how to otherwise find a good house cleaner. * Staffing is hard but I think you exaggerate how hard it is. Lyft has managed to solve this problem successfully and I would argue Exec has as well so this is at least two existence proofs. Postmates and Instacart also seem to have solved this problem but I haven't had enough datapoints to confirm.* Have you ever had a car washing business? How did you fare with finding a good staff? * Proper incentive structures can trivially solve the cancellation problem. Just charge a cancellation fee if you cancel within an hour of cleaning.* Oh charge a fee you say? How do you think I will do that? Credit card? Then I have to deal with chargebacks and lose even more money than not doing anything. Mail them an invoice? Not going to work. Please provide some insight into this because I do want to learn how you would do this. * Some people are going to be fucktards the best way to deal with it is to just treat it as a statistical phenomena and price it into your model. There are lots of things you can do to bias the natural level of fraud but, anecdotally, companies I've talked to seem to report that just "has to own a smartphone" is enough to cut fraud by a significant amount.* My model could only be priced at a given rate because of competition. By pricing in fucktards I would be pricing myself out of non-fucktards. * Barring certain mathematical proofs, it's impossible to prove that a startup won't work, only that it hasn't yet. The reason to spend $5M is that if you discover a way that it could work that nobody else had the patience/foresight to discover, it could be worth many multiples of that.* You are right. But it does not take 5.25 million dollars to prove that Cherry would not work. Just a couple of thousands to test at a local market. In fact, most startups these days don't need millions of dollars to prove their business model. They just need thousands, not millions. Thats why YC only gives people a small bit of money as seed. They know that there is no need to spend that much. Where you do need money is to scale the operations and that varies a lot from business to business. Cherry would have been able to scale without much money, because they did not do anything themselves (the sub contracted the work). I do appreciate that you took the time to reply, but I have real world experience with this, whereas you only are speculating while using Silicon Valley startup logic to it. Doesn't apply (hardly ever, actually).

visualcsharp 14y ago
Thank you for injecting reality into the discussion. I couldn't care less whether one's post is angry-sounding, upset-sounding, careless-sounding, etc.; I don't read HN for emotional support. I do read it for posts like yours.
rprasad 14y ago
Agreed; it's always annoying when people with no experience in an industry claim that sketchy startup logic will somehow overcome real-world problems that have vexed businesses for decades (or longer). Employment, fraud, and customer development are all very difficult business problems, which is why so many companies have IPO'd by making them the slightest bit easier (i.e., Monster, Paypal, Salesforce). By the way, visualcsharp, you've been dead for the past 16 days (at least). A review of your comments doesn't explain why, so you probably annoyed a moderator.