X Marks the Spot: Jordan Metzner Co-Founder and CEO of Washio

 

 

Washio is an on-demand, premium laundry and dry cleaning service that customers can use via an online and mobile app. Washio provides 24-hour door-to-door turnaround, green cleaning, pre-sunrise through late night availability, and a cookie at every pickup. Led by Jordan Metzner, Co-Founder and CEO, Washio has been growing extensively with no plans of slowing down.

 

Xfernet: Jordan, your background is really interesting because it marries a technology capability with substantial business experience. What was your starting point as an entrepreneur, and how did you manage to combine both your tech side and business side?

 

Jordan Metzner: I started off by studying entrepreneurship via scholarship at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business, which offered a hardcore, 4-year program that gave me a great foundation.  I graduated in 2005, at the height of a very rich job market – but I decided I didn’t want to get a job. Instead, my friend and I bought one-way tickets to Argentina and moved there. Initially, we didn’t have a clear idea or plan for a business, and we didn’t have that much money – but after some trial and error and learning the ways of doing business in Argentina, we opened up a burrito restaurant, launching “fast casual” dining in Argentina. It was the first of its kind there, and we grew quickly; after establishing operational best practices (by way of a 600-page ops manual in Spanish), raising some capital, then franchising after our first three stores, we grew to 14 stores throughout Latin America within three years.  In 2010, we had an opportunity to sell, and at that time I had been watching what was going on in the US market in terms of technology development and I wondered what kind of technology was I missing out on? I took a year off to recharge my batteries – got married, traveled, then eventually joined a tech firm called Xsolla, running product and partnerships for them. I worked with some big logos while I was there – Google, PayPal – and enjoyed the job, but what I really wanted was to start another company. And I’ve always been a tech nerd, so when it came time to build my next business, I knew I wanted to be in the technology space.

 

 

JM: I was going out with a friend in New York, and when we walked out of the building, a Mercedes was waiting for us – and I was flabbergasted because it was so extravagant. Then my friend told me that it wasn’t crazy, that an app on his phone made it possible. That’s when it hit me that there were these opportunities everywhere. Anything was possible!

 

Living in Argentina, I used a service to have my laundry done for me. So I thought: what if I could get my laundry done, on demand, with an app? That app would then know my location, handle payments, etc. There were many reasons why mobile and local was such a great strategy for this particular service. This world of laundry and dry cleaning is a high margin, highly repeatable industry. It’s very commoditized and repeatable, and it’s not going away.

 

Building on experience from running our previous business, we built everything on standard operating procedures and we’re constantly improving processes to get a product that’s the same quality across the board – assuring consistency from city to city, based on standardization of deliverables. 

 

 

JM: Scaling was and still is our constant and biggest challenge. Simply put, we’re a manufacturing business, which means we have to keep quality high while scaling up volume. We have a committed SLA of 24 hours turnaround time, and we work with a lot of partners – contracted vendors, drivers – and build out warehouses, set up distribution networks. We have to keep up with demand, deal with the massive volume that comes through the door, while still keeping the customer experience as magical as possible.

 

 

JM: You have to always be prepared to service the customer. For us, we can’t outsource our core functions, such as customer support; we have to staff up. Proactive scaling is necessary so that growth still means quality and uncompromised SLAs.

Technology companies are very understanding of growth, like gaming companies or hosting providers, for example, that understand business growth and how that translates to infrastructure. For us, it’s much harder to scale up our business, which is equivalent to a manufacturing plant. You have to hire proactively today to make time to train, growing based on projections vs. actual.  We have to do that to meet customer expectations – that’s our job every day.

 

 

JM: When we first started, we were working on a mobile app. When we were pitching the idea, everyone told us that we just needed to get our business live. So we put the app on hold, built a basic web form online, and went live the next day. 

 

The takeaway is that you can start with simple things that don’t require heavy time or expertise – you just need something functional enough to get your business off the ground. People get intimidated, thinking they have to build so much technology to make a business happen. In the beginning, we had no real technology – but what we had was fine, because it was enough for us to launch. 

 

Today, Washio has a full development team of 11 people, 9 different mobile apps, front- and backend databases, dev ops, and ongoing product development. Every time we develop or enhance a product, the impact is much greater – one new feature means the whole engineering team has to come together to make it happen.  As we get bigger and we have more customers who have Washio in their pockets every day, there’s more scrutiny in how we build our product and its quality.

 

 

JM: In our early stage, our database was not SQL, so it was harder to query and rather cumbersome. We’re now moving over to our new database, which is already built and live with the new data coming in, with existing data being migrated over. In the beginning, it’s hard to know what that database structure should be, but as you figure it out, it becomes much easier to scale up your business. 

 

My advice: Build backwards, ask important questions, and plan for scale. It can be a Catch-22: Do you build from bottom up and build to scale, which can be a slower and costlier build up front? Or do you worry about scaling up later and get it out the door fast? There’s always a “technical debt” to be paid – it’s just a question of paying now or later.

 

 

JM: People question if Washio is a technology company. Our service isn’t technical, but if your definition of a tech company is something that is based and built around technology, then no doubt about it – we are definitely a tech company. We run real-time 45+ server instances, routing algorithms run every 1-3 minutes, our drivers route around the country operating off of mobile apps, which come to our backend systems, which talk to our client systems, etc. etc. So much happens in real time that it’s all technology, all the time. Yet the output is dry cleaning, which is not technical – it just takes a lot of tech to make it happen.

 

 

JM: It’s very important to have a technical cofounder alongside you whom you trust. In general, engineers are in high demand with high salaries. Technology recruiting is very competitive, so you can’t satisfy someone based on just salary or equity alone.  They’ve got to be in a place where they’re emotionally invested and motivated and satisfied.

 

My advice for other tech entrepreneurs is to go for it. We’re in a renaissance of technology businesses, and it’s just the beginning of what’s to come – look at Uber, AirBnB. In the early days of Amazon, no one wanted to use their credit cards online; now, people will share cars and their homes with strangers. What’s next? How are we going to be more economically efficient? 

 

I think the U.S. is going to continue evolving, consuming less hard goods, but still enjoying a high quality lifestyle. And technology makes all that possible. We are opening ourselves to more of a connected world, with powerful globalization. Technology is changing the world for the better, and many more experiences will be optimized through technology.

 

 

JM: We’ll always be focused on improving the quality of our product, growing within the markets we’re in, and then opening up in new markets going forward. 

 

Our top priority is delighting our customers. We have a long ways to go to perfecting our product, but we are striving for the highest customer satisfaction, making the customer experience seamless while growing and scaling up our business.