An ‘Uber for garbage’ picks up steam, and $11.7M in Series A funding
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
It's tough to "casually observe" startups because you can't flip through their 10-Ks, but you can think of individual startups metonymously - learn more about their industries, and then try to figure out why these startups are trying to use technology to make better products.
Either way I predict success. Down the line they'll be acquired by Waste Management, Republic, or Waste Connections to become another Oak Leaf.
http://itsalwayssunny.wikia.com/wiki/The_Gang_Recycles_Their...
What's next? An Uber-like service that will deliver gasoline directly to your car that is parked in your driveway?
Hmm... Come to think of it, that would actually be pretty sweet. I would never have to stop and fill up my gas tank! It would just always be full! A gas delivery truck would come in the middle of the night (according to a schedule I define using the mobile app), and it would fill up my car's tank and automatically bill my credit card!
For example, if the three gas stations closest to you charge $2.62, $2.55 and $2.67 per gallon, you will pay $2.55. We purchase this pricing data from the Oil Price Indexing Service (OPIS), and we update it regularly.
How do they make money? I wonder how high the delivery fee is.
Edit: $3 for delivery generally and they're using F250 trucks. Call it 1.5t in the bed or about 400 gallons plus tank. They probably have a contract with the local bulk terminal so if you're paying 2.55, they might be paying 30% (no idea what this margin is) less or so. @400 us-gal if they make 30% on the gas plus $3 per 15gal tank, revenue would be in the $380/load range for an average of 26 tanks of gas per load.
Edit2: regarding the loss leader strategy, they still have to truck the gas to the station which adds overhead. By going direct to customer (again, assuming they're loading at the bulk terminal) they remove a couple middlemen who's position they then take.
EDIT: Looks like they pay anywhere from $18/hr to $22/hr for their delivery people: https://www.comeet.co/jobs/filld/42.00E
Also health, dental, and vision benefits + PTO, FSA, and free lunches. Wow.
Mostly a "pamper early adopters with VC money" operation I think, possibly with a profitability story (that may or may not turn out to be realistic) centered around high real estate value areas: in those places where the ground occupied by a gas pump and its accompanying infrastructure plays a significant role in the local fuel price, using public rights of way for mobile pumps is effectively a value transfer from the public to the pump operator.
Back during the original dotcom, when all anybody could think of was basically a mailorder shop with a website, I joked with friends how a "fuel.com" could be a great parody of contemporary startups and/or a fine participant in the hype wave.
I still think that sending pickup trucks to fill individual cars is stupid, but it's leaps and bounds less stupid than "mailorder fuel" would have been. A nice illustration of the difference between the current breed of VC money sinks and the dotcoms of old.
I think the real takeaway here is that even at ~$400 per 25 cars refueled, it's not a super great market to be in. It's also kind of like starting a printing company during the 21st century (cough cough Vista Print). Yes, there's a sliver of margin to be had with aggressive automation and negotiation but at the end of the day, you'll be out of business in a couple decades when the underlying technology changes, in this case electric cars that can be charged at home.
Almost no convenience stores make money on gasoline, unless they're operating a special setup (the convenience store chain Sheetz for example has tried to build out their own gasoline business to cure this problem). There are a few routine exceptions, usually involving either some kind of rare location (eg right outside an airport exit, usually operating under a special arrangement), or a rare event (something that causes gasoline to be in unusual demand / limited supply).
Profit on gas was measured in cents per liter, with premium giving the best margins. And by best I mean $0.023/L or $0.087/gal.
That and the increasing prevalence of electric cars, Uber, and other shifts are why the gas-delivery model will likely be unsuccessful over any reasonable duration.
The idea seems to be moving in the opposite direction as the rest of the world.
Further, gas stations generally need to pay quite a bit to get gas shipped to them as it's heavy (12 gallons is over 75 pounds), dangerous, and often very far away.
So, cost at the refinery is very misleading.
Delivering to a bunch of vehicles on one street or hitting a bunch of vehicles in one lot/garage is better than one fill per location.
It seems like they shouldn't be targeting consumers except as a means to target small businesses and municipal fleets.
Modern fuel pumps are slow compared to the old ones. (Seriously, if you stop at a gas station with the old style pumps it'll blow your mind how fast they are.) Sending someone to put 20gal in a van takes at least 20min assuming a few minutes driving. @ $9/hr that's the same labor cost as a $3 fee. Paying these people to come to you and fill your fleet of vans costs the same but is more convenient and ensures you get the lowest local price.
They say that they will deliver to a single area for a single fee. http://www.filld.com/groups/
I bet if it were three cents per fill up cheaper, people would choose Uber-level drivers.
Fire Marshalls have to catch you before they can use their teeth.
The convenience factor is really on point, I no longer think about oil at all, its always taken care of.
Which is what they want, or rather they don't want you thinking about phoning round for the best price.
The most thought I've put into it when I had a VW TDI was to fill up at a stations that were busy and more likely to have fresh fuel. A brand name station isn't a guarantee that the fuel is fresh if it is on the road less traveled.
A lot of municipalities have limits refuse. For example in NYC you can no longer get rid of electronics in the regular trash. You're supposed to take them to a place that can deal with it. Fair enough. The problem is that there aren't many places and some of them are only open week days. Folks from outer burrows that cannot drive are not going to be able to do that.
Also, sometimes you need to get rid of a lot of stuff that you don't want to move when moving because you're going to get new stuff on the other side (bed, mattress). It'd be so much easier to call somebody up and have them just take it away on the last day of your lease.
Having had a garage I recently organized and about a pickup load full of trash/recyclables I would have absolutely loved such a service vs. trying to find someone non-flaky on CL to actually show up when they said they would.
Why not use 1-800-GOT-JUNK or a similar service?
it is 100% the same formula. Start by hiding your real cost in weird price schemes. Advertise like crazy. ???. Profit.
It is a proven method. And it revamped for every generation. 1-800, app, "as seen on tv", catalogs, etc. And now you have subscription services of tangible goods for the millennials.
Although I laugh at the name, there's no one else doing anything like 1-800-Got-Junk for overrun garages, overcrowded basement storage, etc.
The only thing I notice is that each region has a 1-800-Got-Junk operating under a different name.
It's also not a subscription service (?)
There are about a dozen of these.
fuel panda is one that is run by a friend of mine
But I stop to buy gas twice a week. It's my most common, most automate-able errand.
I can already just call Got Junk and have them take most things. However, the canisters of paints and other crap that needs to be dropped at special locations? They won't take those.
Since I don't own a car (by choice), I'm essentially screwed. The disposal locations are only on very specific days with bad hours, and usually in the middle of nowhere.
It's the only thing I can't easily do without driving. Get me someone who will pick all that shit up and they'll get all my money.
> "A high-tech garbage service may sound ridiculous to the uninitiated. But it’s no joke to customers like WeWork, Whole Foods and SoulCycle that have signed multi-year contracts ..."
> "TC: How do you charge? One fee for an unlimited number of on-demand pick-ups per month?
GL: We establish yearly contracts, charging so much per month for an office space after we do an audit on the business and establish that it generates, say, 50 bags of garbage in a set amount of time. Everything above that then is extra."
I believe this will be a great great business and borrows nothing from Uber anymore than from Taskrabbit or Postmates. The domain experience needed to understand the whole logistic should have made Techcrunch think twice about that headline. But sure clicks and all that.
I live down the street from a New York City grocery store. Once a week all their boxes and stale groceries wander out onto the sidewalk from where, at convenient times like 5pm or Midnight a garbage truck blocks traffic while making robot-sex sounds. Apparently, private garbage pick-up was axed when Fairways last went bankrupt.
For example, my waste service will drop off a dumpster for your use for up to a week. They'll do that, for free, twice a year. I've never seen anyone else on my street use this service, but I have several times.
They'll also do electronic recycling (call and they'll tell you when they can pick it up) and the same for massive piles of lawn clippings. I also make use of the lawn clippings pick up yearly, when I'm doing major work on the yard.
two dumps near me serve all these haulers and from just talking to a few to reading their websites many have government contracts as well. the local schools have branded dumpsters!
reading the article the one service which looks cool is giving customers assurance of where their waste goes so that they in turn can use this as a halo effect when getting customers for their own service. plus if you could effectively track and route specific types of recyclables surely there is profit in it
I pay about $25/month for weekly pickup. Some weeks I have less trash and could skip the pickup, but that doesn't save me any money. Some weeks I forget to set it out for pickup on the designated day and I have to wait until the next week.
If I could get my trash picked up on demand whenever I have a full bin that would be something I'd seriously look at. I think it's a great idea.
Unfortunately I think it would end up being more expensive. No way ad-hoc pickup out in a rural area is going to be cheaper than a truck sweeping through the area once a week and servicing all the houses on one trip.
The wild variety of situations means that large companies don't want to have to wade through all the possibilities at each of their locations and instead hire a broker to manage their waste at all sites. The broker then works out how to get them service everywhere and uses their domain knowledge to get a decent price from the hauler where negotiation is possible.
It appears to me that these guys are a Broker++ since they are building meaningful relationships with the haulers that service their customers. As they say in the article they have two customers (the waste producer, and the waste hauler). This is definitely a departure from the typical broker that treat the haulers poorly (delaying payments, short paying, never paying, ridiculous requirements, etc for the haulers). I can see it working out really well for them if haulers are comfortable letting this company inject themselves into their trucks via an app.
FYI - I work in the industry writing software for independent waste haulers. Before that I operated my family's waste hauling operation in CA. We offered 1x week residential and up to 6x per week commercial collection as part of an exclusive contract with the City. Our customers paid us directly but that's not always the case with city contracts.
When we clean out the garage, my girlfriend and I rent a uhaul truck to take everything to the dump/goodwill/storage.
If I could use this service to just have somebody show up with a truck and pick up the things we want to throw away, it would be really helpful.
How does this startup compete?
And this is large dumpster like you find behind grocery stores.
Recyclers or garbage pickup could become efficient and lucrative for the small truck recyclers and scrappers, if villages could request a pickup and any available driver could accept and create his route for the day. Uber for garbage pickup and recycling was how I referred to it to people at airports, and anybody who would listen. Their idea is similar but more of a money-maker catering to first world businesses like Whole Foods. I hope it can branch out and become successful in the villages around the world for the local economies too. I wish them luck and prosperity.
Renting a dumpster will go unused for most of the time I've rented it for; it'll also cost $400-$500 it seems.
I don't have an HOA, but I'd bet I'd only be able to choose from the nicest (read: pricy-est) waste management companies and have little time with it in my driveway.
Getting those "Bagster" things is pretty cool, but kinda steep considering I have to buy the bag(s) and each one will cost $100-$150 to remove.
This is a much better solution than using my 2-car garage as a holding tank until I get a "dumpster's worth" of crap to throw away.
While people are put off by "Uber for X", sometimes it just makes sense, and makes people's lives better.
As someone who has used the Bagster myself, I found it very convenient and easy to use. Purchase the bag, go online to the website, pay and schedule the pickup. I thought the price was fair, compared to the alternatives.
Municipal trash contracts are frequently locking you into cans provided by the trash company already -- they do it to ensure compatibility with the side load machinery, and also so they can charge you based on use; if you produce more waste on a weekly basis, you need to order a larger bin; if you produce less, you can request a smaller bin.
They often won't take pure trash on junk that can't be sold(food waste).
Genius guy that grandpa, as he was also a pig farmer, and the pigs loved to eat garbage...
It's a double edged sword for sure. I'd love to see more open and creative competition in the industry, but since disposal and transportation costs make up such a huge % of a hauler's expenses there will certainly be corrupt entities dumping waste in a canyon somewhere just outside of your community.
Tracking the waste from source to destination accurately and in a way that people can truly trust will certainly be a key to success here. It's worth noting that it is still very likely that some contracted and "compliant" haulers are doing things with your waste that they shouldn't. So that's another place that a start up could potentially differentiate themselves.
Then this driver drove the wrong way down the road in order to a get a bit closer to a load of garbage without having to go around the block.
It's a business that externalizes its costs by driving dangerously and killing people: http://nyc.streetsblog.org/2010/07/13/see-a-pattern-of-deadl...
So if this service rolls out in my area, I can either leave this large piece of garbage in my yard for a week or so waiting for the government to come pick it up, or I can open an app on my phone and have someone pick it up today.
Here's the description from a random city:
For items that are too large to fit into the trash cart, residents may request the free pick up of household bulky goods three times per year. We will retrieve up to four large items such as furniture, appliances or up to 20 plastic bags of refuse or bundles of yard waste (less than 50 pounds each) for each request. Advance notice is required. To schedule a free bulky goods pick up, please contact Waste Management...
The towns around where I grew up used to make you pay money to get rid of metal (!!!!). Consequently it wasn't uncommon to find washing machines and old rims in random places. Then a scrap place opened up, appliances stopped showing up on the side of the road and the scrap place that only took copper quickly got ran out of business.
People don't want to dump stuff illegally, it's just the least worst option in the moment.
I don't produce lots of big trash. Not sure why I--nor anybody else--should subsidise people who produce lots of big trash.
Those fines pay for enforcement. They also pay for picking up garbage dumped by unknown persons. This model shifts the burden from everyone to just the offenders. I find it preferable to small households subsidising big ones.
[1] http://www1.nyc.gov/assets/dsny/downloads/pdf/about/laws/DSN...
That's what your argument basically boils down to.
Obviously it's not in our collective best interest to have trash accumulate on the streets. So we all end up paying for it collectively, regardless of how much we consume the service as individuals.
Economically, clean streets are non-rivalrous (my clean street costs little more than my neighbor's) and retroactively excludable (through fines). This makes it a public enterprise good, akin to mail or trains [1].
Case in point: mattress and A/C sellers in New York City dispose of your old mattress or A/C for you. If pick-up of such things were free, fewer would do that. One response might be to regulate every thing one might purchase that could produce big trash. The other is to just make people who choose to make big trash pay for it.
[1] http://www.pitt.edu/~upjecon/MCG/MICRO/GOVT/Pubgood.html
I'd happily pay for a service to take it there but there is a catch 22: as an individual I already paid (through taxes) to leave stuff. Companies have not - so if I pay a company to take my things there, I'd also pay twice to leave the stuff there as they can't leave my stuff "for me". If I could somehow give a transport company the right to use my free (tax paid) recycling/dumping right then this would work here. Without that, can't work for individuals. Would work perfectly for businesses though.
Seems harsh actually.
I'm sure it would work great for a small community of up to a couple of hundred carefully selected individuals, but I think anyone who thinks it would work for general society is a bit blinded by their ideology.
In the end, the only forms of Government that have worked at scale have centralised governance, and democratic Governments seem to be the least-worst workable systems.
Often times, they are improved by working outside the system itself, it seems. So there are some interesting options for tackling this hard problem. The company mentioned in the article may turn out to be a great example of this.
Governments do come in many forms, with varying size, composition, and effectiveness. However, the ancap vision of no government and everything done by "voluntary" contract has no meaningful basis in reality at this point, as far as I can tell.
But that doesn't mean you couldn't a) pare back the state to the bare minimum functionality (which doesn't include garbage collection, IMO) and fund it voluntarily.
You could do that with the entity called “the state”, but that entity would no longer be the state or government, no matter what it was called. (It might be an arm of the real government, which might consist of entities voluntarily funding the “state” which themselves exercise coercive, in practice, extraction of wealth, or it might be an irrelevant figurehead.)
What about tribal societies?
Sorry for being grumpy, but this is as useful a contribution as "Wouldn't it be better if we harnessed the power of house-elves to magic away our trash?"
To extend your analogy: "The magic house-elves are already making our cars, writing our software, and growing our food. I wonder if we should pay them a bit more to cart away our trash too."
The house-elves shouldn't be doing the law enforcement or the Government (and in fact they _are_ right now, e.g. in the case of for-profit prisons and the Fed, and it's a disaster). But they're a bit under-utilised right now in some areas :)
Basically, this is just setting up a giant tragedy-of-the-commons situation.
You could even argue that such an arrangement is voluntary in a narrow definition of a term. Definitely not one to satisfy most libertarians/anarcho-capitalists, but good enough for us to say we're not living in a state where we have absolutely no power over the state's spending.
Wouldn't a savvy gamesman just vote for their own self-interest?
The idea is that it's more "expressive" than one person = one vote. And it's more manageable than pure direct-democracy. Look, you could fiddle with things and have "minimum" amounts so that people can't completely break a government feature if they don't like it. E.g. 100% of people voting to have 0 military spending. But, if that were to happen, is that not a hint to politicians that none of the voting populace wants military spending?
To me it's another way to give more power to the individuals, rather than leaving it solely in the grasp of politicians.
In the US (a democratic republic), I see that the decision makers act in their own short term self-interest.
The risk with an enlightened despot (think typical corporate structure) is that the person at the top can really cause damage, because they don't have checks on what they can do. We can imagine the downside right now -- the strength of the republic is currently being stress tested to see if it can salvage itself simply by resistance, friction, and inefficiency to prevent Mr. Trump from destroying so much.
Off the top of my head: I would pay twice for x. Given how bad gov services are.
Edit: Cool downvotes Marxist bros. Our national health service can't be super inefficient (I'm just about to go on a waiting list for a year) & my rubbish collection can't have just halved the amount of trash they take every two weeks. You're right!
Some rich folks pay companies like Waste Management to do it for them.
What's wrong with that model?
Yes, and this is pretty common even in areas where the population isn't particularly spread out.
Sure, communal pickup is flawed - but so far, it seems to be the better solution.
Regular waste is easy enough: weekly collection is OK. Larger items which can be incinerated are OK-ish: need to make an appointment two weeks in advance, and pay by weight.
Anything else and I'm screwed. I'd like to get rid of a metal ladder, but it can't be incinerated. I'm supposed to take it to a municipal recycling centre, but I can't because it's too heavy and I don't drive.
Yet this same ladder, years ago, was delivered to my doorstep after a one-click purchase on some website. Why shouldn't I have a one-click disposal?
Used motor oil, insulation, car batteries, and other toxic stuff, I could see a door service being useful.
A good tip for anyone suffering through one: they can't legally interfere with amateur radio towers, so if you're dissatisfied with having to live with your HOA, you can put up as big of an amateur radio tower as you can afford and they can't do anything about it.
Chicago trash service is utterly amazing. Literally anything that fits in your house you put in the alley and either the scrappers take it within hours, or the trash men haul it away without complaint.
Other cities I lived in were atrocious. You'd be looked at crazy if you had anything remotely considered an abnormal need. Such as traveling a lot and not being able to put your trash bin out every single week for pickup (as you'd be fined daily for leaving it on the street). Something stupidly that simple is exceedingly hard in most places in the US - and picking up large items is usually an even worse experience.
The everything-else waste pickup day will take bulky things that don't go in the normal trash or recycling: ladders, washing machines, couches, desks, lamps, tires, bicycles, sewing machines, etc.
For example, Houston has this kind of everything-else pickup 6 times a year. There's once a month pickup of oversized waste of two kinds. It takes tree-related waste in odd-numbered months, and non-tree-related waste in even-numbered months: https://houstontx.gov/solidwaste/treewaste.html
For example, here are the pages for Los Angeles, San Francisco, Santa Cruz, and San Jose, which all offer the service free of charge: https://www.lacity.org/for-residents/popular-services/bulky-..., https://www.recology.com/recology-san-francisco/bulky-items/, http://www.cityofsantacruz.com/government/city-departments/p..., https://www.sanjoseca.gov/index.aspx?nid=3649
This is also when scrap hunters drive by with their trailers looking for resale items.
Everyone wins.
1. Motor oil, electronics, toxic waste: They say you can't throw them away with the garbage but your only other alternative is to take time out of your weekday to drive that stuff to some government center somewhere (during business hours--I suppose you're not supposed to have a job).
2. Large items that can't fit in the trash can: There are apparently several special times a year when these things will be picked up, but only when several planets align and it's a weekday. You need to place it exactly on the right spot next to the curb, it needs to fit into a certain dimension and be under a certain weight or they'll leave it there and you need to wait for the next blue moon to come along in order to dispose it.
3. Anything else you need to get rid of that doesn't align with the garbage company's tight requirements: $50-100 trip to the dump.
I've had the best luck by just putting stuff in my front lawn with a big red "FREE" sign on it. People will scavenge ANYTHING. I've gotten rid of piles of dirt this way.
Inflation?
EDIT: Not sure I understand the downvotes. The cost of milk goes up every year too, and it doesn't get any better. Between inflation and unsustainable municipal expenditures (e.g. pension plans), it's not surprising that trash service follows the same MO.
Because it doesn't happen where you live doesn't mean it doesn't happen where he lives.
or you could reduce your use of those items.
I do and I don't like to pay your toxic garbage and used batteries garbage collection for you.
No one pays 50% of their income as tax. That is not how tax brackets work.
Furthermore, the overwhelming majority of income tax goes to the federal government.
source: https://tradingeconomics.com/sweden/personal-income-tax-rate
In theory I certainly agree with you. In practice, these agencies and government-backed crony companies have zero accountability, zero recourse, and no customer service.
I think government will not seize the opportunity to organize itself using internet technologies, for the simple reason that people will complain about surveillance (government slowness and red carpets would also be an issue).
Uber drivers seem to go for it, but not without grumbling.
Also, it's important to view this initiative as a rebirth of the waste broker. They're already super common in the industry handling the waste collection services for all the locations of large corporations, they negotiate with haulers to service each site then make sure services are performed. They tack on a fee for streamlining/managing this service for each company.
One of the larger brokers was purchased by Waste Management a few years ago. Since WM is a hauler too, they're now gathering tons of data about each market that can be used when bidding against smaller/independent haulers. Lot's of haulers would be happy to help another broker succeed to get WM out of their affairs.
https://gimletmedia.com/episode/industrial-organic-s02-ep03/
From that it looks like their domain isn't in use now so my assumption is they closed up shop. Does anyone know if they pivoted further out of refuse market or were acquired by someone?
Seems this company raised based off an old business model of 1800 Got Junk and Junk King, on the coat tails of Rubicon Global's massive fundraising amount.
https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/3b7m9n/the-mob-made-south...
This is a classic disruptive solution and I wish them the best!
Some items are classified as hazardous materials, and it's hard to get rid of them. You need to do a dump run, but many platforms do not allow you to do business involving hazardous materials (e.g: Craigslist).
I hope they have an answer to that. e.g: Getting rid of batteries and such.
And I wonder if these two have had any cover from it.
Their target seems to be commercial waste removal, which seems like a better play than residential.
> yearly contracts.
ok.
Please, son. The Bezos Whole Foods don't pay no externalities!