Nelson Tao credits Walter White with inspiring his startup.
The UT Austin senior was watching the Breaking Bad protagonist run his drug operation from the basement of a dry cleaning facility when he realized most dry cleaners outsource their dirty work. And in his experience, the storefronts don’t add much value to the transaction.
Tao founded his on-demand dry cleaning and wash-and-fold service with CTO Ryan Norton, a third year electrical engineering major and fraternity brother at UT Austin. The goal was to improve on existing laundry services by partnering directly with laundry facilities at wholesale rates, then personally picking up and delivering orders in central Austin placed through their app between 7 a.m. and midnight — all for the same price as taking your own laundry to a storefront dry cleaner.
For now,
relies on a small team of drivers Tao and Norton have met on campus, and a spare room in a Zeta Psi house to hang and tag orders. They don’t need to store much, though, because they deliver orders as quickly as possible instead of storing them for weeks at a time like a traditional cleaner.
With more than 200 customers and average orders in the $40 range, the biggest hurdle is making deliveries around their life as students.
“It’s definitely impacted our partying schedule,” Tao said. “Sometimes we’ll be out at the bars on Sixth Street when an order comes in. We’ll literally draw straws to decide who has to take an Uber home and wake up early to pick it up in the morning.”
But it isn’t always that easy to maintain Tao’s stringent standards of customer service. He’s currently running the last gauntlet of final exams before graduation, and recently didn’t have any drivers available to meet an order’s deadline.
“It caused [the customer] some headache, so I refunded her in full, gave her a $100 gift card to Nordstrom and showered her place in flowers,” Tao said. The woman is still a customer.
Some of Press’s regular customers are short-term rental property owners who like to have their linens cleaned and pressed to hotel standards between guest stays, a customer segment that is easy to find in other markets and is likely to continue growing.
With school out of the way, he said, the company can continue focusing on growth, pouring profit into marketing and eventually raising funding to hire sales staff and drivers.
“It’s like in the last episode of Silicon Valley — sales people want to work for companies with a product that sells,” Tao said. “And what’s easier than selling a laundry service that’s fast and convenient for the same price as going to a dry cleaner?”
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