Laundry industry is one such industry that has high logistics and operations expenses. Investors are hesitating to take part in series investment rounds for startups in this industry. People who stepped in this industry flipped out sooner than expected. Riding the same industry wave, PKC laundries are proving everyone wrong.
Yesterday Premanth Kundurthi (Founder of PKC Laundries) and I had a long discussion on why aren’t they shutting down. High logistic expenses, unorganized sector, personalized customer request and difficult to scale up are few reasons I shot on him to know his startup experience. Surprisingly PK discovered a magic sauce that made these reasons of shutting down into reasons for getting funded. This boot strapped startup is running on the traditional exponential growth model without any VC funds and very soon expanding into various states.
P in PKC stands for patience
PK tells us the most important tool to run a successful laundry aggregator startup is by patiently listening to customer requests, acting on them fast, and finally patiently wait for your startup to grow. In terms of operations he has tied up with various gated communities, villa associations, and other societies to promote his services and to schedule a pickup on a specific day. Based on the geography, time to travel, distance to travel, he had strategically designed pickup and drop points to reduce logistics cost. Read more Startup Stories.
Delivery executives are the face of the company
PK says that the face of PKC laundries is the delivery executive, since the executive spends more time with the customer. The executive makes sure the clothes are cleaned as per customer requests. If a customer is not satisfied, the clothes are rewashed till the customer is happy. Well this helped him grow organically thanks to word of mouth marketing.
Make your customer feel like a king
Many startups are taking funding; expanding to various cities and shutting down once the investor funds are depleted. PK says customer satisfaction is the only driver for successful running of their company. He had bad experience with ecommerce portal (A), so he moved to ecommerce portal (B) With this experience in mind, his team provides the best experience so that they do not lose clients to competitors.
The startup’s business model is as lean as it gets and they are ready to launch in various states. In other states they will use a partnership model to keep the costs low and penetrate faster into the market. PKC is riding against the tide, and at various instances proved their mentors wrong. They are aggressively moving ahead and are open to investor funding. Read Startup Funding News.
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