947 - Danilo Dominici (LaundryBud) On Building Uber For Laundry

Mat Sherman:
All right. How's it going, everyone? Welcome to another episode of Forward Thinking Founders, where we talk to founders about their companies, their visions for the future, and how the two collide. Today, I'm very excited to talk to Danilo Dominici, who's the founder of Laundry Bud. Welcome to the show. How's it going?

Danilo Dominici:
Thank you. Yeah, really good. Really good. Very excited to be here.

Mat Sherman:
Yeah. Excited to have you on always happy and excited to interview local founders, put a spotlight on good old Arizona ecosystem. So excited to, I'm excited to have you on. So the, to, to kind of dive into it. Um, what is laundry bud? What are you working on?

Danilo Dominici:
Yeah. So laundry bud is an on-demand laundry service that is helping time press college students with their laundry by providing fast quality services, resulting in students having more time for their day-to-day activities.

Mat Sherman:
Cool. So walk me through a little bit about, you know, if I was a student on campus and I wanted to become a customer or, you know, a user of LaundryBed, can you kind of walk me through what that process looks like and what I would experience as a customer?

Danilo Dominici:
Yeah, of course. First, you start by downloading, signing up the usual app things, right? And soon as you place your order, that's when one of our trusted student washers receives a notification about the order, picks it up, services in the communal laundromat, and drops it back off to you without you having to do anything other than press a couple of buttons, making this process ultimately simple for both users and washers, creating that convenience that I think we're missing living in dorms in college.

Mat Sherman:
Amazing. And why did you decide to get started with this? My guess is that you experienced the pain yourself, but I'm not going to assume like what's the origin story and why are you working on Laundry Bed?

Danilo Dominici:
Yeah, so you're on the money. It was because I experienced on my first weeks of freshman year a huge issue that the laundry machine in my dorm didn't fit my bed sheets. So I had to go to an outside laundromat and buy the product, buy the detergent, buy the fabric softener, and you bought When I bought them, it was in a type of disposal thing where you have enough for one and a half washes right so you buy it, you use it once and then you have a bit left over where you don't want to throw away. And then you just can't use only that bit for detergent and I was first. going to create an intelligent vending machine to place in college dorms. But I realized what college students really don't like about laundry isn't the caring. They just don't like the whole process about it. So that's what I really wanted to hone in on and focus like, hey, how can I make this better for students who need more time or for students who need more money? And ultimately, that's why I founded the company.

Mat Sherman:
I love that, making life easier for students. I'm all about it. I'm curious, what is your day-to-day look like as you're working on Laundry Bud? Are you fundraising, getting customers, go putting flyers all around campus? What's your day-to-day look like?

Danilo Dominici:
Yeah, so I mean, as you obviously know, and most people watching this, there is no average day on the startup, right? Some days, putting up flyers and trying to get customers, whereas other days, I'm working on my pitch deck, working on, you know, bettering the offering, further increasing what we have in the app, so that it's what customer wants, right? Because if we're not giving the customers what they want, our students what they want, why would they use this, right? So just continuously, I would say that's the main thing I focus on continuously improving so that our market, our customers are happy with what we're giving them.

Mat Sherman:
And if you're going to look out into the future, you know, three, five, 10 years, as far as you really want to look, what do you see is the big vision for Laundry Brother? You know, in a decade, what does that company look like? And how does it like impact the world?

Danilo Dominici:
Yeah, so ultimately, in the simplest way of putting it, we want to be where Uber is at with cars, but we want to be there with college laundry. So we want to be in every major college in the United States. And currently, we're just servicing on campus dorms. And we want in the future to service the apartments that are adjacent to it as well. Because for example, here at ASU, there's 25 college student apartments right next to campus. And those students also don't have time. They're still college students. They still need to work. They still have the same issues. So we really see it as a huge opportunity to first get all the dorms in major colleges and then the apartments.

Mat Sherman:
And in order to make the vision come to life, you'll need some help, right? I mean, it takes a village to make a startup work in scale. So my question for you is, how can the forward thinking founders community help? Are you hiring? Are you raising money, looking for more customers, you know, people to work with? Like, how can we assist?

Danilo Dominici:
Yeah, so I really do think the biggest thing I need assistance with right now is having someone else on the team. Right now, it is just me and doing marketing, finances, programming, operational, and the things every entrepreneur has had to do by themselves at one point. We know how overwhelming that is, right? So I really would like to have a technical founder in here to you know, help me with the stuff that is really time consuming, but not really impossible, right? It's not super hard, it's not extreme level of complexity, but it is very time consuming programming and whatnot, right? So that is my biggest ask, I would say, from this community. If there's someone that's interested in joining this company and joining me in this journey, I would be more than welcome to listening to you.

Mat Sherman:
And then if that person's out there listening and they want to learn more, or a potential student wants to learn more to become a customer, how can they find you on the internet? Do you have a website, any social media, email, anything like that?

Danilo Dominici:
Yeah, so we actually have a website, www.laundrybud.com. Our Instagram as well, laundrybudinc, and my email, which is danilo.dominichialaundrybud.com. anyone that's interested can reach out to me through any of those methods and I'll reach back out to them and we see if we are the perfect fit.

Mat Sherman:
Well, thank you so much for coming on to the podcast. I really appreciate it. Thank you for having me.