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Comment by AdamJacobMuller | Hacker News Reader

> FoldiMate

Is this a joke? A machine that, when you take a piece of laundry and after de-tangling each piece (fixing inside-out/sleeves/etc) and then orienting it properly, insert it into the machine in a specific way, will fold laundry in "a few" minutes. All this for the low price of $1,000 USD and they claim to deliver in two years (which we all know will slip).

If this machine let me dump a dry bucket of laundry in the top and came out folded, that might be useful but expensive.

If it let me dump a dirty bucket of laundry in the top and it came out clean/dry/folded, that would be super useful and cheap!

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I know the guy behind FoldiMate a little bit. I've met him at trade shows. One thing I have to point out is that he has pursued this dream for years. Lack of interest, team, funding ... nothing has stopped this guy. It's a really hard problem and he keeps at it. I can't say I'm rushing out to buy one myself, but there's a human story here too, and I think that's been lost in the coverage.

He can be the nicest and most driven guy in the world, that doesn’t change whether or not his product is any good.

You wouldn’t buy, say, a car that only got half the mileage or whatever just because there’s a human story behind it. There’s a human story behind almost everything.

I don't know if there's an equivalent in the US, but here in the UK we have a TV programme "Dragons' Den" where people pitch their business ideas - which are usually invention-based - to a panel of potential investors.

Easily the most intriguing aspect of the show is discovering the often inordinate amount of time, energy and money that the candidates have invested in what, to the disinterested outsider, appears to be a completely mad and unworkable idea: the potentially destructive power of human determination.

Dragons Den exists in the US (and Canada) too, I believe. There’s also Shark Tank. I quite enjoy watching Dragons Den (and Shark Tank on youtube).

I agree with your second paragraph completely. I also totally undrestand it, having cofounded startups myself in the past. You get tunnel vision.

"Shark Tank" is what "Dragons' Den" is known as outside of the UK. It's the same show.

Ahhhh! Thanks for the correction.

That's great, unfortunately he seems to have lost perspective and is developing a product no one will want at a price no one will pay.

Well, I guess you have to start somewhere. I'm sure his goal is to make a machine where you can just dump clothes in and they come out folded. But the technology isn't there yet and it takes time to develop. He's probably hoping he can sell a few of these useless machines and keep funding his R&D until he can build a fully functional version.

If he can make it work the first ones will be for the crazy rich and the next generation will be much less expensive.

I'd think the crazy rich would just hire a maid.

Laundrettes?

Maybe if you had a guy whose job was to feed clothes into it in just the right way. TBF an experienced laundry person can fold them manually, much faster.

Don't let a robot do something a human can do better.

A robot doesn't have to do something better than a human to succeed; it just has to do it well enough for us to accept the trade-off.

A good example is robot vacuum cleaners: I have had one for a few years now and it's easily the best purchase I've ever made: it doesn't vacuum as well as we do but it does it everyday which is something I'm absolutely unwilling to do. Having it in my home greatly reduced the amount of time we had to dedicate to cleaning the floor and dusting non-floor surfaces (it turns out that daily vacuuming the floor has a huge impact in the amount of dust collected everywhere else).

Why not ? Humans are still far better than robots at car manufacturing, and yet ... nobody wants to go back to that (well, none of the customers or company leaders would want the prices to rise by enough to make that possible)

Does anyone want a folded ironed shirt with the buttons done up?

The last thing I want to do when getting dressed in the morning is undo a bunch of buttons.

Defeats the point right!

There already exist machines that work on a more industrial scale. This seems aimed more at the home market.

These machines suck too. In the factory clothing is folded manually using a basic device so it looks neat.

At some point, the better answer to is to admit that the timing and possible solutions are not viable. Think of what could be possible if that determination was applied to something else.

This makes me think... are there any special circumstances in which clothes need to be folded in such a special way and with sufficiently high throughput that this kind of machine could make headway? Oftentimes general purpose technologies can come to market only after predecessors in niche areas.

As a side comment mentioned: hotels would be an ideal case because they have a lot of standard things that need to be folded (sheets, pillow cases, towels, etc.) and sticking to those basic cases could probably bring the cost way down and reliability way up.

(But I suspect you don’t need a fancy machine for simple shapes - a simple folding wooden rig would do and be almost as quick. Hell, I’ve got a cheap plastic thing that’ll do shirts in seconds.)

hotels would be an ideal case because they have a lot of standard things that need to be folded

Large hotels and commercial laundry operations already have expensive specialized machines for folding. This does not seem to be targeting that market.

> Oftentimes general purpose technologies can come to market only after predecessors in niche areas.

There are already such machines in industry (in garment-making, hotels etc). The challenge is that they are typically specialised towards specific types of garment. Nobody in industry really needs a generic machine; but that's the only configuration that the home market will consider. The only sub-niche big enough that could maybe sustain a specialised machine in the home is "shirts and trousers" - but there the real annoyance is ironing, not folding.

Perhaps he could focus on folding towels and then sell the device to the hotel/AirBnB industry?

They already exist for large hotels for things like towels.

Fairly expensive machines though, and typically can only fold 1 type of article (eg: need a machine for each towel size or spend time setting it up)

> but there's a human story here too, and I think that's been lost in the coverage

There's a human story behind every product.

Yes, and 99% of the time it's "fuck it who cares dude lets just lie we need users". I've been at the forefront too many times. There's never been a remotely 'human story'.

If it could do that, a 5-10k pricepoint wouldn't be a problem either.

Maybe he could repurpose this to fold origami or something.

So he's insane?

Most founders are, the successful ones at least.

The successful ones are insane and lucky.

With a heavy bias towards lucky (but they will usually attribute it to everything else but luck).

I already have a machine that lets me dump a bucket of laundry in the top and have it come out clean/dry/folded.

It's called Washbox, and it's a locker in the atrium of my apartment building. I drop my clothes off, text the locker number to the company, and my clothes will be returned clean the next day. It is, in fact, both super useful and cheap.

I'm sure they would love to automate their washing & folding process further, but those implementation details are already well abstracted from me as the end user. If I were interested in automating laundry, it seems smarter to start by targeting industrial use by existing laundry services who will be willing to pay more per unit and put up with more quirks than a home user would.

Just looked at their pricing, that's a bit high...

They'd be charging me almost as much just to do wash & fold than I pay for someone to clean my whole house....

So the $70 a month plan seems interesting. I spend maybe an hour on and off doing laundry a week. Add in time to start and stop whatever I’m doing so let’s say 1.5. So that’s 6 hours a month. That’s a touch less than $12 an hour. My time according to work is more valuable than that.

I can see it being worth it for people who make a decent income and spend that time doing something else. It’s pretty much the same as any service for things that need to be done regularly. As your time becomes more valuable, it makes sense to delegate those tasks off.

Interesting to think about whether half-way solutions might be better.

A robot that puts my kids' clothes in a bag for pickup by a laundry service might be a winner.

Or one that sorts out intimates and drycleaning from towels and shirts, so that the latter can be sent out. My wife's primary objection to laundry service is that it's too personal to send out. Thus, the dream of a robot that can do it all in-house.

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