HostelHub: laundry pickup for college hostels
Two students in Pune want to fix hostel laundry. This is how they'd use StaFeb to go from a hunch to something worth building — one slide per step.
An idea, a few conversations, and no product.
A tested price, a first decision, and a feature in progress.
Two sentences before anything else
Problem and customer, as narrow as they can make them. Every later step is judged against these.
Hostel students lose 3–4 hours a week to laundry: shared machines are broken or queued, and outside laundries don't pick up from campus.
Second- and third-year students in private engineering-college hostels in Pune.
What has to be true — riskiest first
Four guesses, each rated for impact if wrong and how unsure they are. StaFeb sorts them so the dangerous ones get tested first.
One finding per card, with its source
They talk to students and visit laundries. Each thing they learn becomes an evidence card.
Useful, but neither tests the riskiest guess: will anyone actually pay?
22 pre-orders in 6 days — the price holds
The cheapest test that could prove “students will pay ₹49” wrong: a landing page with a pre-order button, shared in three hostel WhatsApp groups. Pass mark, set in advance: 15 pre-orders in 7 days.
- Created an evidence card from it
- Marked the assumption supported
- Moved the next best action to the next untested guess
Launch in one hostel first
Demand is proven at ₹49; operations aren't. So they decide to start small — and write down why.
One hostel keeps the laundry partner within capacity while they learn how pickup actually works.
A feature that knows why it exists
The decision becomes a feature, the feature becomes tasks with owners. Nothing is built that can't trace back to evidence.
Name, room, bag count, slot. No payments yet — UPI on delivery.
One gap, turned into a role
They list the skills the build needs. Two are covered. Campus marketing isn't — and one click drafts a listing with the real work in it.
| Capability | Covered by | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Frontend development | Meera | covered |
| Vendor operations | Aarav | covered |
| Campus marketing | — | gap → listing on the StaFeb board |
The whole chain, in one place
Months from now, anyone joining HostelHub can see why the booking form exists.
Stage: Validation. Next: test the warden.
Two high-impact guesses are still untested, so StaFeb keeps them at the front of the queue. That's the whole method: guess, test, decide, build — and never lose the thread.
Record the result of “The Block C warden will approve a gate pickup point”
A finished experiment becomes evidence and updates the assumption it tests.