Laundroswipe — the laundry marketplace I actually shipped.

Students had laundry. Vendors had idle machines. The gap was trust.

VIT Chennai has thousands of residential students. The existing flow was a WhatsApp mess — vendors texting in scribbled timings, students unsure whether their clothes would survive, prices quoted ad-hoc. No pickup windows. No status. No receipts. The result: half the student body washed clothes in a sink.

On the vendor side, the problem was different. Machines sat idle for six hours a day because they had no way to announce availability. The demand was there — they just couldn't see it. Both sides wanted the same thing: a predictable handshake.

A marketplace that did one handshake really well.

I shipped the narrowest possible v1: students see vendors with open pickup slots, tap to book, vendor confirms, done. No ratings, no chat, no in-app payment. The handshake was the only atom.

The first 30 vendors got onboarded door-to-door, in person, because cold signups didn't convert. Students came in via posters taped to hostel doors and a referral loop that rewarded supply-side invites more than demand-side ones — because every new vendor created capacity for 20 students, but every new student only created demand for one vendor.

Numbers, unvarnished.

The launch week was not smooth. Three vendors dropped out before the first weekend because I'd forgotten that washing machines at hostel accommodation shut off at 10 PM — my booking UI let students pick 11 PM slots. One stayed up fixing it live. The vendors who came back the next Monday still work with Laundroswipe today.

Boring infra, chosen on purpose.

Five things I'd tell the me of July last year.