The Laundromat

An unexpectedly good investment.

A laundromat is perhaps the most despised business you can start. No AI. No impact. No exponential growth. Just: you set down machines, people wash their clothes, you collect coins.

But there's something genius about it. You need little knowledge. You don't need patented technology. You don't need venture capital. You can start tomorrow with a thousand euros.

And more importantly: you make money immediately. Not next month. Tomorrow. From there you can scale growth.

This is why I recognize it in the DIP manuscript as essential. Inclusive production cannot only speak of grand ambitions and subsidies. It must also work for people without connections, without capital, without inheritance.

A laundromat is perfect because it doesn't require scale. You don't need everyone on earth to use your service. You need two neighborhoods that want to wash their clothes. That's it.

And yet a laundromat is a business. You hire people. You learn to manage people. You learn cash flow. You learn what breaks and how you fix it. You learn customer engagement without sitting at a lean table.

Many tech billionaires once started with something that made slow, crummy money. They used that as a training ground. You don't learn entrepreneurship from courses. You learn it from making money.

The question for inclusive economy is: how does someone build without a million in startup capital? With a laundromat you can. With a SaaS business, an app, a two-million bootstrap, almost no one can.

This is design for inclusivity. Not because it feels good. Because it actually works for more people.

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Source: Observations from startup and business ecology