That's a sane question. IMO it's the current financial environment that encourages such "leap without looking" strategies.
Fear of missing out is huge right now.
I know of a startup that received a multi-million valuation and many more million in funding. They don't even have a prototype!
It is worst than tulip mania.
What's changed is that debt is almost free. That allows VCs to take (very!) speculative bets for relatively low risk. They know that if each of their portfolio companies has a 10% chance to reach 30x returns, investing in 10 companies should pay off.
Like if you wanted to open a dry cleaners.
Now, how well the current crop of startups is delivering on that promise is an exercise left to the reader, but it's there in theory. A dry cleaner has marginal costs and no economy of scale, and so can't attract unicorn valuations.
It isn't the absolute size of the numbers that matters. It is the ability to rapidly scale the business once you have the right business model and product.
And quite possibly huge ongoing marketing costs! But if churn is low, or even negative, you can assume something like 10 year customer lifetimes, with a comfortable 5-ish percent cost increase per year, on sale for the first year's contract value. If you have cheap-ish money available, you should buy as many of those as the world is willing to sell.
This theory fails to adequately explain WeWork.
I mean, I think you should be right, but in principle I do not see why WeDryClean should not work while WeWork does.
Equity capital is solely interested in business models that either wow people or fail outright. The reason has to do with risk: most such business ideas have various things that can go wrong, and those risks are generally manageable but not really quantifiable. Basically a VC wants to see "These are the assumptions in our model, and if we build this it will revolutionize X industry, which is currently worth $50B but could be worth a lot more with our product, and that will give you a 50% annualized return on your fund." And they're giving you money to prove out whether those assumptions are actually true, with the expectations that for a good number of startups they won't be and their whole investment will be wasted.
Once you make money, it's much harder to come up with outlandish numbers. A dry cleaners has a well-established range for revenue and profit, so it's hard to justify why it would be worth $100 billion.
If you want a cleaning company worth hundreds of millions, try ZZZZ Best https://www.investopedia.com/terms/z/zzzzbest.asp
The Medium version did update the terminology a bit (since RSS and 3G weren't as exciting in 2015 as they were in 2009, hah)
You'd finance your dry cleaners with debt rather than equity because (unless you are starting a chain) you are not shooting for the massive, near-zero marginal cost scaling that the venture capital model focuses on. Instead, the bank looks for a modest, predictable return through interest payments.
First, there's a delivery part. Delivery companies often become very big and make a lot of money.
Second, centralizing many small dry cleaning places into one has Significant economic advantages.
Third, they probably use an asset-lite model like Uber.
Fourth, all those make them somewhat similar to some sucsesfull, high growth companies , so it's possible they'll grow big.
WeWork is sort of the golden example of a business being sold as something that works at scale... except the business doesn't actually work at scale.
That is part of why it costs more/takes longer than simple laundry which is frequently still done at the mom and pop location. Although, I think the larger chains (Jack Brown) are entirely just storefronts sending the laundry and dry cleaning off to some centralized location.
So, I doubt there is much advantage to further centralization that hasn't already happened.
Also, I'm not even sure about the hotel bits, most hotel's I've stayed in recently _DO_ their own laundry. They have a couple giant commercial machines sitting in the basement for the sheets/towels. I know this because I always take the stairs and often take a wrong turn and end up in the basement/etc.
When looking at a potential business as something that can be economically scaled you always need to find the saving factor, for WeWork the saving factors are Administration efficiency (to administer 10 properties individually you need 10 administrator labour units, maybe for grouped properties you can get away with 6), rent leverage (being well established might lower the apparent risk of your lease being canceled early, so you may have some savings there) and maintenance (this is a significant one, I bet you could really scale down the expense of janitors and the like if you have multiple properties in a dense area). But none of the costs I listed above are seriously impacting your cost per sale, they're all quite marginal savings, so you'd really need high volume to reap that benefit and it's likely that the cost of marketing, building an app, having a crazy CEO etc... will outweigh the savings you could eek out.
Now I can't, which is a shame. So in that sense, I wish someone would fund me. I have a lot of "doodling the internet" type of ideas. I use digital note taking extensively myself, so I know what's missing.
[1] doodledocs.com
I'll give you another hint. Add shape recognition and move from capturing and storing pen strokes and generating bitmaps to capturing pen strokes and generating shapes. Add rudimentary grouping and ungrouping functionality, ability to move, stretch, rotate, etc. Allow pasting clip art and letting it grow/shrink/rotate when grouped with other objects, but just with a rough scaling, etc -- it doesn't have to look pretty. It's just for sketching things out.
Practically every software/design team needs an application like this and there will be money to pay for it.
P.S. I was on a team that built this as a windows application about 20 years ago, but we were ahead of our time. A SaaS webapp would be the bomb here.
My company reliably earns low-7-figures on high-7-figures revenue, with respectable but not amazing growth, but the only capital "market" open to us is bank loans and merchant financing.
Nobody cares about boring profitability.