A laundry service is kind of passé; surely what we'll see next is a laundry-sharing service. Not only does that save money by using washing machines belonging to members of the public - otherwise idle capital assets - but you could extend that to wearing other people's laundry.

A laundry service seems like a labor-intensive business (as in, 99%+ of the work is physical labor). Reality likely is that there just isn't much room for non-laboring founders and investors to collect money off those performing the service of the business.

"I wonder what it takes (or how many similar failures) for the "market" to balance and finally come up with something sustainable."

It already has. As others have pointed out, just about every laundromat and dry cleaners already offers these services. Just not through apps.

Why isn't someone providing apps for these businesses? Perhaps apps aren't so important...

Its possible investors think the concept it sound but the management and strategy has not been, so if they just trim around the edges a bit they'll hit at the magic formula that works.

Start-ups can be really idiosyncratic and rise and fall based on the talents, failings, and egos of their core founding teams. So it's really easy to tell yourself that the idea is good but th execution was bad.

I think this is one of those ideas that sounds very solid, but might be less so.

Who hasn't said, "I wish my laundry were done and folded by someone else?!" The problem might just be that the problem is so much easier to state than the solution, however.

Maybe the solution isn't related to a service that comes to your house, takes your laundry elsewhere, and brings it back to you. Each of the failed startups (I think? going off the top of my head) did this, in one form or another.

I know of at least three laundromats within a few blocks of my apartment here in SF that offer dropoff wash and fold, at last check at about half the price of the pickup services I looked into (standard pricing, not promotions). I think the market for people willing to pay significantly more for what is honestly not much more convenient (they need access to your building or sometimes apartment, you have less control over the dropoff and pickup times, etc) is quite small.

Investors funding "Uber for X"-style startups generally seem to miss the things that make Uber work so well -- on-demand low-trust service that fully replaces the alternative. Cleaning my house or doing my laundry can't effectively be done on-demand, and done in a scheduled manner involves a trust relationship too extreme to rely on reputation/rating systems.

> Who hasn't said, "I wish my laundry were done and folded by someone else?!" The problem might just be that the problem is so much easier to state than the solution, however

No, I think the problem is that dry cleaners and wash-and-fold operations already exist. Its basically Uber fighting the taxi services -- if the taxi services weren't artificially limited in supply by medallion system and other special regulations that Uber could simply choose to ignore (accepting legal risk in so doing) while building a market and then lobbying for special regulatory accommodation based on the market it developed proving the need.

Following that, Laundry Locker in San Francisco has been in existence in 2005, so they're doing something right. And they have to deal with the cost of renting a physical location.

And businesses have had their uniforms laundered for quite some time, but their orders are more uniform than consumer orders, and damages to items probably are probably a non-issue, whereas consumers will have sentimentality attached to clothing.

>If the business model has been proven unsustainable multiple times in a row, why founders continue to try and investors continue to believe?

Too much money, too much time. We slowly went insane.