How a Solo Founder Built a SaaS by Selling to Laundromats

**Fexingo** (0:01)
So, there's this founder named Maria Chun, who built a SaaS for laundromats. She started because her parents owned a laundromat in Queens, and she saw them run everything on a spiral notebook and a cash register.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:14)
A spiral notebook in 2024 That's wild.

**Fexingo** (0:19)
Right. And the thing is, her parents weren't tech-averse. They just didn't see software as something for them. Every solution they'd seen was for dry cleaners with complex inventory or for large commercial laundries.
Nothing for a 20-machine storefront where customers walk in with quarters.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:38)
So she built it herself.

**Fexingo** (0:41)
She did. Maria was a product manager at a fintech company. She knew how to write SQL queries, but she wasn't a developer. So she hired a freelance developer from Upwork for $3,000 to build an MVP.
A simple web app where customers could load money onto a card and track machine availability.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:01)
Wait, the MVP had a card system? That's hardware.

**Fexingo** (1:05)
Yeah, and that was actually her first mistake. The card system required installing readers on every machine, which added cost and complexity. She piloted it at her parents' store, and within a month, she realized the hardware breakage rate was too high.
The readers got jammed with lint and detergent residue.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:27)
So, she pivoted?

**Fexingo** (1:29)
She pivoted hard.
She dropped the card hardware and built a mobile-first booking and payment platform. Customers use the app to reserve a machine for a specific time window, pay with a credit card or digital wallet, and get notified when their cycle ends. The laundromat owner pays a monthly subscription of $99 per location, plus 2% per transaction.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:53)
That's interesting because laundromats are famously cash-heavy. Did owners resist card payments?

**Fexingo** (2:00)
Some did, but Maria's argument was simple.
The average customer spends $12 per visit. If they can't pay with card, you lose the customer who doesn't carry cash. And that's especially true for younger customers. She had data from her parents' store showing that after they added card acceptance, weekend revenue went up 15 percent.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:22)
So what was her sales playbook? How do you sell software to someone who's used to a spiral notebook?

**Fexingo** (2:29)
She didn't cold call.
She went to laundromat trade shows. There's a national laundromat association convention. She set up a booth with a tablet showing a demo. She also offered a two-week free trial where she'd personally set up the software for the owner. No credit card required.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:47)
Did that work?

**Fexingo** (2:49)
It worked well enough that she signed her first 10 stores in three months. But the real breakthrough came when she started offering a revenue guarantee.
She told owners, if your monthly transaction revenue through the platform doesn't increase by at least 5 percent in the first 90 days, you pay nothing for the subscription.

**SPEAKER_2** (3:09)
That's bold. Did she ever have to eat the cost?

**Fexingo** (3:13)
Only twice out of 150 signups.
And in both cases, the stores were in areas with very low foot traffic. She learned to filter leads by checking foot traffic data from a third-party source. So she stopped wasting time on stores that couldn't benefit regardless of the software.

**SPEAKER_2** (3:31)
What's the key metric she tracks for stores?

**Fexingo** (3:35)
Machine idle time. Her platform records when machines are booked versus when they're actually used. The average laundromat in her network had machines idle 40% of the time during peak hours before her software. After that, dropped to 20%.
That's a huge efficiency gain.

**SPEAKER_2** (3:54)
So owners can see, oh, my washer 7 is empty between 2 and 3 p.m. Let me run a promotion.

**Fexingo** (4:02)
Exactly. She built a dashboard that shows real-time utilization.
One owner in Chicago started offering a dollar off during slow periods, and his daily revenue went up because he filled those gaps.

**SPEAKER_2** (4:16)
What's her revenue like now?

**Fexingo** (4:18)
She's at 150 stores.
So subscription revenue is about $15,000 a month. Transaction fees add another $3,000 to $5,000 depending on volume. She's not venture funded. This is a bootstrapped business. She told me her goal is to hit 500 stores by the end of next year, which would put her at roughly $60,000 a month in subscriptions.

**SPEAKER_2** (4:43)
That's a solid niche SaaS business, and she's basically the only player in that space.

**Fexingo** (4:50)
There are competitors, a few point of sale systems that also work for laundromats, but none are built specifically for the self-service laundry model. Maria's edge is that her software is exclusively for laundromats, so she can obsess over details like the notification when a dryer cycle ends or integrating with coin machines.