A founder started NuWash, an eco-friendly mobile car wash, with $5,000 from his grandmother. He cold-called apartment buildings for customers, worked nights operating the service, and hit ramen profitability before raising capital after about 12 to 16 months.
Chapters
So kind of going back to New Wash, what were the first steps that you actually took to start it as a business? Yeah, so our founding story goes, I was living in a grimy college rental house with a few other guys, and one of my buddies was really just looking for a summer job, and he ended up going and washing cars at this car wash that was in the mall parking lot. And that's what he was doing every day. quickly got promoted to be like a manager there. And what was unique about what they were doing was they were using— they were washing cars using a low-water, eco-friendly wash method that effectively enabled them to wash a car anywhere. And he was quite mesmerized by the whole thing. And I was intrigued as well. And he was coming home to me telling me like, man, people really love getting their cars cleaned, you know, in such a convenient way. And I was like, and we're doing it using this low-water, you know, eco-friendly wash method. And I was questioning him like, well, you know, you've got this really cool wash method that you can wash a car anywhere and going to the car wash does suck. So why don't you guys, why are you guys effectively operating like a brick and mortar car wash just in the mall parking lot? And, you know, we had a little bit of an aha moment in that regard. And so what I ended up doing was I was working at one of these other startup companies at the time and I was able to get my hands on like one of their pitch decks. And, you know, had no experience really prior to building out a pitch deck, but took that pitch deck and, and took— templatized it and kind of built our own car wash, mobile car wash pitch deck. And actually, I was, I was really just helping my friend and he was going to go and pitch this new business concept to the guy who was running the mall car wash business. And he proceeded to do that. And the guy said, hey, you know, thanks, but no thanks. And he came home quite defeated. From that meeting. And I was like, well, why don't we just do this ourselves? What does that guy have over us? He does have more money, but we can definitely outhustle him. And so I think we proceeded that night to go outside and wash my car and just, he was kind of showing me the techniques and everything. And I put in my 2 weeks at my full-time job the next day and we got things started. So that was kind of like the origin of how we got things going. And I distinctly remember after, as I'm sure most of you can relate as well, like within that first week, me realizing like nothing happens in this business unless I make it happen. And otherwise it's not going to go anywhere. And I hadn't ever washed a car before, nor had we gotten any real paying customers yet. And so What we just started doing was we started calling different apartment buildings downtown and saying, hey, we want to wash your residents' car. We'll give you the first one for free. And then we said, actually, let's go and start walking into them. The first building that we walked into, the manager was like, we'd love for you to do that. And actually, I'll buy the first 50 car washes so you don't have to do it for free. So we're like, oh, that's amazing. We've got our first paying customer. And so we ended up, you know, we had to learn the business on the ground, a pretty operationally intensive business. And so the only way to actually learn it on the ground was to go and get, you know, our fingers and nails dirty and wash those cars ourselves. And the only time at which we could actually afford to do that because we were still in school at the time was at nighttime. And so that matched up well to focusing on these like residential buildings where all of the residents were home at night. So that's our origin story. And we ended up, you know, we had no capital at the time. We started the whole business with $5,000 that my grandma left for me. And so we really had no capital. So the only way for us to pay ourselves or to have any capital to do anything was to go wash cars. But fortunately, we were, you know, it's a cash-flowing business kind of, you know, from the first car wash, assuming that it's not free. So we were able to do that and pretty quickly become like, you know, ramen profitable as we call it. And then we lived that life for about 12 to 16 months before we were able to actually get some capital in the door.
