Lately I've noticed an increase in companies that are trying to deal with the real world, instead of selling software strictly as a virtual good. TaskRabbit, YourMechanic, Uber, Instacart, Cherry - I love all of them. But dealing with the logistics of a physical world is really really tough. I don't envy any of them. Cherry was a great idea, but a tough one to pull off. Good luck to the Cherry guys in whatever they do next.
Cherry was not a great idea. Had they done some research (well, the people who gave them 5.25 million dollars to waste away), they would have learned some very simple things. Disclaimer: I used to own and operate (as in also wash cars) a successful on-site car wash business. Closed it down because it was a pain in the ass to run.
On-site car washing (or any other type of on-site auto service (YourMechanic guys should pay attention)) is very low on margins, and competition is tough. You have to compete with every 13 year old kid who wants to buy a new playstation game and will wash cars for $5. You will also have to compete with every other joe who will basically wash a car for a couple of bucks. So creating a solid customer list is tough.
There are also logistics issues. Getting a group of car washers who are not complete and total fuckheads is impossible (I'd say its easier to win the lottery twice). Cherry tried to circumvent that by having sub-contractors, which in other words means giving some random joe $5 to wash some car. They only provided them with some basic equipment. If you have ever washed a car in the cold, you know that you need more than a fucking soap sprayer and a sponge. There is a lot of equipment needed to correctly wash a car in diverse weather conditions. Sub-contractors did not buy equipment because they were being paid shit. So, getting good employees is impossible, getting good sub-contractors is like finding out you have a rich uncle who died and left you money and that suddenly, every hot celebrity out there is hot for you.
There is also the issue that people dont give a shit about cancelling an appointment 30 seconds before it is due. That plus rain, shady owners trying to blame you for "missing stuff", and people who smoke. Its just a shitty business to be in. The only people who manage to do something in that market are the professional detailers. Those guys do make some good money, but have to spend a shitload of time on a single customer, and cannot (in most cases) reliably duplicate their business in order to have any horizontal growth. The high end market is also very competitive and customer loyalty is very high. No Porsche owner will have some unknown detail his baby in order to save $50.
Also, I so called this. This is one of those "investments" that makes you go "huh?".
Edit:
And here I was feeling bummed about wasting $600 on car washing equipment. 5.25 million bucks! Hell, give me $500k and I'll make Nuuton so awesome that people will say "Google? What is that?" :)
The tone will turn some people off, but this is I think a really good comment, full of details about a specific business based on experience.
Also, coming from consulting, I think I agree with you on the dynamics of subcontracting. People are going to think you're being hyperbolic, but a reliable stable of 1099 subcontractors you can bill out over cost is, fundamentally, free money. Consulting firms know this because staffing a consultancy involves accepting the sales-side risk and paying your team rain or shine. I get a little irritated every time I hear someone brag about a real-world business based on 1099 contractors working on a fixed schedule.
I apologize for the tone. But Cherry just pisses me off because so much money was wasted on that really bad idea. It doesnt even compare to a Facebook for cats kind of thing (which was an un-tested market). Car washing has been going on since carriages were invented (300 years go?). I just hate seeing good money being wasted.
Your sub-contractor part does hit me straight in the heart, because I'm a sub-contractor right now. Its not all rosy and nice, but I do get to work remotely and make my own schedule. It also allows me to work on Nuuton without having to worry about IP issues with an employer. But would still consider a good remote job offer. ;)
Edit:
I also have to add that I studied this market from every angle. Even went as far as testing an android app to get customers to order car washes through it. People would download the app and just create an appointment through the app to get their car washed. Payment would be handled by the app itself. But it tested horribly and the local market did not want it. In the end, its just one more business that did not work out. After a dozen or so, it doesn't make you feel bad about it failing. :)
Subcontracting is fine, right? It's building a business that depends on staffing subcontractors reliably that isn't; those kinds of businesses are basically predatory.
Yes, sub-contracting is fine, as long as you find good people to work with/for. I'm very lucky in that regard because I work with a great team and we build incredible stuff. But yes, as a free lancer I get a lot of requests from those predatory businesses. Makes me angry that so many people just want to scam and steal with no regard to the bigger picture.
I'm not a car owner so I have no stake in this fight but I feel the need to rebut some of the claims:
* Anything is low margin if you provide a commodity. By being a car washer, the only people you see are people getting their car washed. What you don't see is people who need to get their car washed but don't. Some proportion of those people don't because the existing interfaces are too difficult to use. I just used a pathjoy recently to clean my apartment and I was willing to pay a premium to use them because I have no idea how to otherwise find a good house cleaner.
* Staffing is hard but I think you exaggerate how hard it is. Lyft has managed to solve this problem successfully and I would argue Exec has as well so this is at least two existence proofs. Postmates and Instacart also seem to have solved this problem but I haven't had enough datapoints to confirm.
I think what a lot of companies in this space are unaware of is that, no matter what problem you ostensibly solve, you are also ultimately solving how to scalably acquire talent. I think one thing that has helped immensely over the last 4 years is that the recession has created a pool of under/unemployed resourceful people that these startups are now capitalizing on.
* Proper incentive structures can trivially solve the cancellation problem. Just charge a cancellation fee if you cancel within an hour of cleaning.
* Some people are going to be fucktards the best way to deal with it is to just treat it as a statistical phenomena and price it into your model. There are lots of things you can do to bias the natural level of fraud but, anecdotally, companies I've talked to seem to report that just "has to own a smartphone" is enough to cut fraud by a significant amount.
* Barring certain mathematical proofs, it's impossible to prove that a startup won't work, only that it hasn't yet. The reason to spend $5M is that if you discover a way that it could work that nobody else had the patience/foresight to discover, it could be worth many multiples of that.
* Anything is low margin if you provide a commodity. By being a car washer, the only people you see are people getting their car washed. What you don't see is people who need to get their car washed but don't. Some proportion of those people don't because the existing interfaces are too difficult to use. I just used a pathjoy recently to clean my apartment and I was willing to pay a premium to use them because I have no idea how to otherwise find a good house cleaner.*
People who don't wash their cars just don't care enough about their cars to wash them. That's it. Also, finding a good house cleaner is not the same as a good car washer. You can stroll into a tunnel type car wash any day of the week and not have to worry about a thing. Having a stranger come into your home to clean is really stressful. Congrats on finding a good service provider for that.
shalmanese 2 hours ago | link | parent | flag
I'm not a car owner so I have no stake in this fight but I feel the need to rebut some of the claims:
* Anything is low margin if you provide a commodity. By being a car washer, the only people you see are people getting their car washed. What you don't see is people who need to get their car washed but don't. Some proportion of those people don't because the existing interfaces are too difficult to use. I just used a pathjoy recently to clean my apartment and I was willing to pay a premium to use them because I have no idea how to otherwise find a good house cleaner.
* Staffing is hard but I think you exaggerate how hard it is. Lyft has managed to solve this problem successfully and I would argue Exec has as well so this is at least two existence proofs. Postmates and Instacart also seem to have solved this problem but I haven't had enough datapoints to confirm.*
Have you ever had a car washing business? How did you fare with finding a good staff?
* Proper incentive structures can trivially solve the cancellation problem. Just charge a cancellation fee if you cancel within an hour of cleaning.*
Oh charge a fee you say? How do you think I will do that? Credit card? Then I have to deal with chargebacks and lose even more money than not doing anything. Mail them an invoice? Not going to work. Please provide some insight into this because I do want to learn how you would do this.
* Some people are going to be fucktards the best way to deal with it is to just treat it as a statistical phenomena and price it into your model. There are lots of things you can do to bias the natural level of fraud but, anecdotally, companies I've talked to seem to report that just "has to own a smartphone" is enough to cut fraud by a significant amount.*
My model could only be priced at a given rate because of competition. By pricing in fucktards I would be pricing myself out of non-fucktards.
* Barring certain mathematical proofs, it's impossible to prove that a startup won't work, only that it hasn't yet. The reason to spend $5M is that if you discover a way that it could work that nobody else had the patience/foresight to discover, it could be worth many multiples of that.*
You are right. But it does not take 5.25 million dollars to prove that Cherry would not work. Just a couple of thousands to test at a local market. In fact, most startups these days don't need millions of dollars to prove their business model. They just need thousands, not millions. Thats why YC only gives people a small bit of money as seed. They know that there is no need to spend that much. Where you do need money is to scale the operations and that varies a lot from business to business. Cherry would have been able to scale without much money, because they did not do anything themselves (the sub contracted the work).
I do appreciate that you took the time to reply, but I have real world experience with this, whereas you only are speculating while using Silicon Valley startup logic to it. Doesn't apply (hardly ever, actually).
Agreed; it's always annoying when people with no experience in an industry claim that sketchy startup logic will somehow overcome real-world problems that have vexed businesses for decades (or longer). Employment, fraud, and customer development are all very difficult business problems, which is why so many companies have IPO'd by making them the slightest bit easier (i.e., Monster, Paypal, Salesforce).
By the way, visualcsharp, you've been dead for the past 16 days (at least). A review of your comments doesn't explain why, so you probably annoyed a moderator.
Almost every type of business has some barriers like the ones you mentioned when a startup tries to tackle it. The goal of a startup in that type of space is to overcome those barriers rather than shying away because of them.
There are even startups trying to make space travel safer, easier, and cheaper. That must really piss off some old hands at NASA who are aware of barriers X, Y, and Z that those startups will face.
For each of the barriers you brought up, have you got any ideas on how Cherry could've addressed them? One trick I've learnt in the past couple of years is that solutions don't need to be 100%. If Cherry had found solutions that worked 80 - 90% of the time for those barriers, they would probably be doing an alright job of overcoming them.
For each of the barriers you brought up, have you got any ideas on how Cherry could've addressed them? One trick I've learnt in the past couple of years is that solutions don't need to be 100%. If Cherry had found solutions that worked 80 - 90% of the time for those barriers, they would probably be doing an alright job of overcoming them.
There aren't any. The problem is that car washing is an extremely low-margin and low-volume business relative to other industries. High margins are measured in the singles of dollars; high volumes frequently means reaching double-digits in customers in a single day.
Cherry's business model actually increased the costs of business substantially by adding in costs for traveling, equipment, employee or subcontractor acquisition, insurance that would apply to infinitely variable service sites, and marketing costs that a normal car wash service would not have to deal with (note: making a distinction between a car wash service and a car wash facility; the two are separate and distinct business models). Thus, economically, it was essentially impossible for Cherry to succeed without first conquering the basic problems that dog existing car wash services.
Wouldn't focusing on owners of high(er) end cars be a way to go?
I know that I don't want a random kid to wash my 50-60-80k car, not do I want keep using those $8 a pop touchless carwashes at gas stations all the time. From time to time I wouldn't mind paying $50 to have the car handwashed and cleaned (but not detailed). Or this is too unsustainable?
In my local market there is a weird phenomenon. The price difference between premium and standard clients is around $5. I tested a lot of different price points, but there was always about $5 difference. Standard customers did also not want to pay anything above $30 for an exterior/interior wash/cleaning. My average sale was $20, if which I made about $6 (30%) in net profit. Not bad? Awful, due to the low volume aspect of the business. I could only do one client at a time, and spent about 45 minutes on each client. Could only book around 8 good clients in a day. It was hard work for little money (unsustainable). Then why did I do it? Because I thought that if I put out an app for people to use to book car washes through their phones, then I could scale the business by selling the sales leads to other on-site car washers and thus removing myself from the hard aspects of the market. I would get $1 for each lead while not lifting a finger. Problem is the app did not test positive at all. Not even in the iPhone (premium) market. I supposse it is a local thing, but I can't change that.
I did, and the bigger margins were just a couple of dollars when all was said and done. In the end, I was still wasting my time with either option. Not complaining because I learned a lot from it.
I use the $8 automated car wash machines because I'm often quite antisocial, and because I don't want to have to take all my stuff, items, and things out of the interior of the car.
When I go through all the trouble of stripping the car, I can just drop it off at a detailing place near the office and get them to pick me up again when it's done.
The sustainable solution to this is to have children and then train/force them to wash your car for you.
There was a HN post or comment about this a while ago. What if the $50 guy you called to wash your 80k car scratches the paint? The company probably cannot get insurance for such damage, so they will have to pay you a paint job for $10 or whatever their profit would have been.
Some of these "real-world" business models are broken because the industry is commoditized. One one hand, the margins don't exist to offer customers a discount (remember, you're inserting yourself in the chain, so need to take some of the profit). On the other, there isn't enough value-added in the product to demand a premium; there's a mechanic on nearly every street corner in every town.
These products need to work for both buyers (people in need of car repair) and sellers (mechanics). In this case, the buyers see some obvious benefit, but what are the sellers gaining?
I agree that this business could have been proven with less money, however, I don't think they wasted all $5.25M on Cherry. From the article it sounds like they are closing down Cherry and pursuing another idea.
It is bubbly that a startup with limited traction raised a large round before having product/market fit and a business ready to scale, but their lucky they have supportive investors who probably believe strongly in the team, thus letting them try something new instead.
Pardon my ignorance, but what made this a great idea? I'm not overly familiar with the company, but it seems like yet another "instead of going to place X to have service Y, X will come to you." It doesn't strike me as entirely novel. And most businesses following that pattern sputter out because they're just not scalable or there's little demand.
$5.25 MM seems like an awful lot of money for something with seemingly few exit opportunities. So I assume there's something I'm missing here.
I called it a great idea because it's actually something I could see myself using. My time is my most valuable asset and so I love the idea of having my car washed in my driveway instead of driving somewhere and waiting around. But as I learned with my last company, a good idea doesn't mean that it will be a good business. It's a rough business for the all reasons listed above. And yes, it's a shame they weren't able to figure that out on 500k instead of 5m.
Why would they need $500K to figure it out? Honestly, why?
I did it with $600 (no zeroes missing). I dont get how people just throw around huge amounts of money like it was nothing. 500K is a huge amount of money and it should be put to work towards building wealth and not towards speculating on bad business models.
And see, you just said something very important. You see yourself using them. But tell me, who washes your car right now? How much do you pay them? How come you don't have one of the local on-site car wash businesses come by and work on your car?
Not marketing. Definitely not marketing. I spent $50 on marketing and it got me about $3k worth of business on the first two weeks. Just some flyers and self-printed business cards.
Ok, so you had 1 subcontractor (yourself). I don't know Cherry's deal, but doesn't seem unreasonable to say that they were shooting for a 1,000. Or 10,000. In geographically dispersed areas. You can see how it can start adding up.
I never said I was the only one washing cars. I had sub-contractors that I paid on a per-car basis. Scaling an on-site car wash to 1,000 or 10,000 sub contractors is not going to happen. And here is why: Too many problems will arise. Insurance claims, theft, etc. will quickly make them raise the price to keep a healthy profit margin. Problem is, once you pass a certain price point, people will simply not buy. Thus you end up scaling for nothing. On site car washing is one of those businesses that just doesn't scale favorably.
There have been onsite carwashers for some years now, decades even. If someone could see themselves using Cherry, they would probably already be aware of this.
Home car detailing businesses are already successful. Basic car washes are only profitable when done at a facility designed to make them as cheap as possible. I cannot see trying to make something more convenient that takes a few minutes and can often be done at the same place where one fuels their vehicle.
Josh - they did their series A 7 months ago. They had raised ~ $1m for seed. I am guessing they didn't burn more than $1.5-$2m to fully scale one market and test what the unit economics look like at a small scale. Since they probably had $3.5-$4m in the bank and they chose not to scale to a few more markets, my guess is that either they really found a much better business opportunity, or they discovered that even at scale retention rate/LTV was low.
Disclaimer: I have been in the automotive business for 23 years, not the tech business.
I have to agree with @orangethirty comments on this page. There is not enough margin in the auto service business to let this succeed. I have known people that washed cars professionally in both small high-end detail shops and full-size car wash operations. The high volume car washes are staffed largely with people that could not get better jobs - felons, drug abusers, those with no education or other job skills. The small high end detailers were generally guys that loved cars and found happiness in polishing a Porsche for an afternoon. There was an old guy named Al that used to come by my office and spend an hour on my truck for $30. I don't know where he went, but I miss the service. You do the math on what his income was per year if he had to travel, pay for soap and supplies, and then only grossed $30 per hour. My math estimates that he couldn't be netting more than $25,000 per year.
YourMechanic will also hit this same problem. They promise 30% savings and at-your-door service. This will run into the same issues. There is not 30% margin to cut at any small auto repair shop that I have ever dealt with. For those keeping track, I sold equipment to 200 auto repair shops over a ten year period. There are many car repair problems that are not fixable in the field. The bigger problem is that auto mechanics have the same rockstar ninja aspects as software. The rockstars simply will not be doing brakes in the rain, outside of your work in the parking lot. Why would they? They can earn $100K a year at a dealer, there is no way they are going to earn less in your parking lot. In worse conditions. In the rain.
Ask the question in a different way. Would you prefer to work in a heated/cooled work environment with restrooms nearby, a break room, a place to wash your hands, specialized tools and equipment nearby, support staff to get your parts, queue up the next job, a counter guy to deal with the customer OR----- would you like to work in the rain, deal with angry customers, no restroom, not enough tools or equipment with you, doing jobs that become much harder because of location, etc etc all for 30% less money? You will not get any talented person to work for you. They have better options. Auto repair is very talent driven, especially any area that is hard like diagnostics, transmissions, or solving the problem that the last 3 shops couldn't figure out.
You wouldn't expect to produce good code in a parking lot, would you?
And then there is the classic problem of auto repair. Once you touch the car, the customer finds all sorts of things that YOU apparently did even though you didn't. Scratches, dents, missing items, the list is long and familiar to all.
"doing jobs that become much harder because of location, etc etc all for 30% less money" --- our mechanics make $75 an hour flat rate. That's 3x what they make at their respective dealerships (on an hourly basis). The fact that master technicians (all 8 ase certs, 20+ years of experience) from mercedes, ford, nissan and toyota are offering mobile car repair services and have already finished over 1000 repairs on our platform is probably a good indicator that not every mechanic thinks the way you do.
I am not claiming that you are wrong or that YourMechanic will succeed (only time will tell).
p.s. Of the 1000+ cars we have fixed, not a single customer ever came back to us claiming that our techs made the dents, scratches, stole stuff etc. I am sure we will one day run into some of those interesting people. I may be cynical and/or naive, but I happen to believe that most people are basically good.
I do hope you succeed. Congratulations on repairing 1000 cars. What sorts of repairs were they? If you pay your mechanics so well, how does the business itself make any money? Other questions that spring to mind: What equipment do they have, what repairs do you specifically avoid, How do you source parts, what happens to flat rate when the part is wrong? I looked at your website last week and don't recall seeing this information.
I have not met a shop yet that hasn't had a ridiculous customer complaint. You seem to be lucky, for the rest of the industry it is always 1% that drives you crazy. By that math you should have had 10 unreasonable customers by now. I also believe that people are inherently good. I did $2,000,000 in sales of $50 tools with Snap-on and only ended up with $6000 in bad debt on what where essentially handshake deals. A loss of $3 per thousand.
Also if you would like to have a non-public discussion, you can email me at gregpilling @ gmail.com
All those things you have listed (types of jobs to do, types of jobs to avoid, sourcing parts, not ordering the wrong parts, making money after paying mechanics really well) were all big challenges. It took us a while to figure those things out and now its our competitive advantage. There are still occasional problems, but we are getting better at it every day. Our model assumes that 2% of the customers will have unreasonable demands / ask for refunds etc. Happy to chat anytime art @ yourmechanic.
I think you make some great points. I would add a few things.
I had my car tires replace by a company that has a truck tirevan.com and comes to your home or office. The cost was more than it would have cost me to wait at a dealer which I gladly paid because of the convenience and scheduling issues. The work was professional and the driver used to work doing the same thing at a retail location and it was easy to see why, for him, this was a much better job.
So the ingredients were there to make the service successful. It was a niche though and certainly wouldn't apply to something which (as you say) needed more parts and equipment (not to mention the pricing which works well if you have a high end car but not necessarily with the Chevy crowd.)
The other issue to consider if doing a business like this as a "business" is the tax aspect. No doubt the guy coming to your house not only was taking a hit financially but was also making those dollars go further by not (speculating) paying taxes on any income (just like cleaning people that work doing that on the side or a handyman or anyone in a "cash" business). I don't know that for sure of course. He could have reported all that income. But from my experience (and I'm sure you will agree) probably not.
I was also in the automotive business for around 12 years. Most of it was spent running my own repair shops, one of which was an on-site auto service like YourMechanic. I had the same experience as the Carwash business. Not much money for too much trouble. Now, a repair garage did work out to be profitable because I'm a great mechanic. My work was always top nothch because I cared about my clients. But when things were going well my brother passed away. I had to close the shop one year later. Thats why I moved on to working on software full time. Decided to completely do away with the auto service industry, unless it has to do with software.
The world of auto mechanics is split into two categories. You have the people in the trade because they genuinely love cars and then you have the people who went into auto repair because their high school guidance counsellor said they should. The first group you could identify with as the hackers, the people that take stuff apart because they find it fascinating, and this interest level over a number of years combines to make them rockstars. This is referred to as the 10,000 hour effect on HN. With the other group, they end up doing basic work but never doing the high pay, challenging work. The common slang for this group is "Mouthbreathers" (1).
So there kind of isn't an average non-rockstar mechanic. I will try to answer your question anyway. A person changing oil and doing brake pad replacement might make between $8-12 in Tucson. This worker would not do any engine diagnostics, nor any specialty work like alignment, air conditioning service, or any problems that would be unusual. A surprising number of problems auto shops repair is unusual. Things like "What is that noise at 70 when I hit a bump" which can often be a hard puzzle to solve.
A better mechanic who can use all the equipment could earn up to $1000 per week as a base, but more typically would be paid on a flat rate basis. So you might get $25 per hour flat rate, and you pay would be $25 x #ofhourscharged . The "flat rate" is typically based on Mitchell Time Guides, which was a book and is now a DVD which lists the expected times to do a standard repair. Unusual problems are not covered in this book, which is somewhat inaccurate but is the best the industry has. (Startup idea: crowdsourced auto repair times).
Specialized skills can get you more money, like any other business. If you are fantastic at transmission repair, or at engine diagnostics, or at solving diesel problems, then you can almost set your own rate. I have a friend who could make a few hundred per hour solving engine drivability problems, but I will note that he is unique. He fixed IBM mainframes before turning to cars. He has his own shop, and works by himself. He fixes cars in a day that other shops have spent weeks on before giving up.
Dealership mechanics can make the most money. A few reasons:
- They work on new cars, so nothing is rusted or dirty. No rusted bolts to slow you down.
- they work on the same cars over and over again, they become familiar
- they have warranty work coming in, and recall work
- the dealership charges more per hour typically than an independent shop
- the dealer is forced to buy the latest equipment, and to send mechanics for training
- the automakers restrict repair information from the auto repair aftermarket
Remember that cars are complex systems now. They involve mechanical parts, electronic parts, wear items, user behavior, and you never have enough information to solve the problem. You don't get to see the source code on anything, most of the time you are diagnosing blind. There are no logs to review besides the trouble codes. Trouble Codes only tell you what the opinion of the ECU is, not reality. I sold several million dollars of equipment based on this distinction.
(1)Side note: once (1996) I won a cruise with 4000 other Snap-on Tools people. My ice-breaking question was "How many mechanics do you let work on your car?" with the typical answer being "none" or "just a couple" which is revealing if you consider that on average a Snap-on Tools dealer has 300 customers. So 1% pass the standard of a salesman who visits him once a week.
I'm sure they didn't spend all the $5.25m on this business idea - and likely have lots left. I wonder how they came to the decision to shut it down and pivot - I think that's they key here that's missing...
What really makes Cherry that special that it needed or received funding? There have been mobile detail services for years already. Was it the "startup" label?
Plus, we really don't need more wasteful services. No way to collect and recycle the waste water for example. Car washes are just ugly wastes of a resource we don't have enough of.
"No way to collect and recycle the waste water for example." - yeah, but there was no waste water from the wash. Cherry used a waterless carwash solution that actually worked pretty well.
My husband was working for Cherry as a second job 3 days a week, and we're really sad to see it go. The money and hours were decent, and he thought it was better than being stuck in a coffee shop or something like that for a second job. He was solidly booked with customers on the days he worked, so I don't think Cherry folded for lack of customers. I also want to point out that not all Cherry car washers were social rejects who had no others options for work except for menial labor... my husband is college educated, we just needed some extra cash.
I think the real crime here, which no one has brought up, is that Cherry gave ZERO notice to the washers that it was going to fold up yesterday. We got an email last night that it was over effective immediately. I'm glad it wasn't our only source of income, but even a weeks notice to get things sorted out would have been nice. FU Cherry!
The Cherry team comes from a pretty cool background with lots of ex-Yammer people. Plus demand was strong... So demand + strong team in a frothy market = why not give them $5.5M to see if there is something real there.
Dumb idea, but that's the beauty of the free market, if you can talk an investor into giving their money then good luck to them.
On the specifics of this idea, I wouldn't trust anyone in the carwash business because of the horror stories about it being the last resort fro felons, druggies etc. Do you really want those people going through your glovebox?
C'mon people! Let's give these guys a break. They had a vision for something great and they tried their best to make it happen. Not every business succeeds, in fact almost many fail. They had the guts, the vision and the nerve to be great.
You should be commended for your backbreaking charity move there, but I'm not sure there was anything "great" about Cherry's goal. Was it really anything more than building a better lemonade stand?
