So, not all US ‘awesome’ venture-backed start-ups make it to stardom – of course very few do.
San Francisco-based laundry service Prim has thrown in the towel – metaphorically speaking. Prim offered an online booking service to pick up your laundry, send it to the cleaners and return it, all for a fixed price of $25 a bag, a proposition the (usually) excellent Tech Crunch gushingly described as ‘awesome’ back in July last year (see here). The service closes its doors this week.
Prim’s young founders were originally backed through US start-up incubator Y Combinator after apparently switching tracks ( ‘pivoting’ in the vernacular) into laundry from a previous video advertising venture – an obvious transition you might think.
Prim was one of a number of such laundry service start-ups in San Francisco – who knows how long the others will last?
Honestly, it seems that US investors will throw money at almost anything vaguely smacking of e-commerce in the hope of making a buck. It behoves all investors to apply some business basics when they look at which horses to back – in particular, and as I have said many times before, if a company spends more than it earns it will run out of cash!
But before that, a little common sense about the business model - and the entrepreneurs' track record - is surely called for.