Deterge
An online laundry service five of us built in college — fast, cheap, no hassle — that grew faster than we expected.
Co-founder & design · Mobile · 2015–17 · University venture
Deterge was an online laundry service for college students — the kind of thing you build because your own laundry situation is genuinely broken. Ours was irregular and overpriced, so five of us in our third year built the app we wished existed.
We didn’t want to buy machines or lease space — we were full-time students. So we became the technology layer instead: aggregate the launderers, own the experience, keep it simple.
We weren’t a laundry business. We were the app that made laundry disappear.
It started as a complaint
It started as a dorm conversation — me and four classmates griping about the campus laundry. We did the obvious thing and asked around: would you actually use an app for this? Enough people said yes that we stopped talking and started building.
Thirty conversations
I built personas from real people, not archetypes, then talked to thirty-odd students across the colleges nearby. The clearest signal came back fast: nobody wanted a signup wall. They wanted their clothes washed, not another account to remember.
A competitive teardown of the laundry apps around us confirmed it — most buried the one thing you came to do under onboarding.
Skip the login
So we made the call that shaped everything: the first screen isn’t a login or a welcome splash — it’s the booking screen. Open the app, request a pickup. Everything else can wait.
Pencil sketches became XD wireframes, and we cut every step that wasn’t pulling its weight. Material Design as the base, with just enough of our own to feel like us on Android and iOS.
The first screen shouldn’t ask who you are. It should do the thing you came for.
Built it, branded it
We shipped an Android app — Android Studio, Java and XML, Firebase for the backend. I worked the front end with the team. (We’d started with an ASP.NET / C# website, then replaced it with a landing page whose only job was to send you to the app.)
The brand was deliberately minimal — a plain wordmark in the spirit of Uber and Google, blue as the one colour, icons drawn in Illustrator. Your clothes came back in a reusable tote with your own tag on it. Small thing; people remembered it.
It actually worked
We aggregated the local dhobiwaale, then landed a deal with a major provider contracted to Indian Railways — suddenly a student app had real infrastructure and manpower behind it.
Eighty-plus weekly active users in the first month, on ₹30k. But the part I’m proudest of is what it set off: classmates started building their own campus apps, and the institute spun up an incubator cell — and took Deterge’s tech to keep it running after we’d moved on.