Tuesday Lab

What do they actually do

Tuesday Lab is an early-stage YC robotics company working on robots that can tidy homes. They are not selling a consumer product yet; their public website is a branding/placeholder page while the team focuses on R&D and hiring tuesdaylab.com, YC profile.

Today they run in‑lab development and testing. The team is building walking and grasping capabilities, collecting human teleoperation data, training models that follow natural‑language instructions to pick up and put away common objects, and making those models run efficiently on their own robot hardware. They also build teleoperation and AR/VR tools to speed data collection and remote intervention YC jobs, manipulation co‑op, Ashby jobs, Built In NYC AR/XR post.

Their current users are internal engineers and interns who collect demonstrations, train and optimize models, and validate behaviors on physical prototypes before any external pilots YC profile, YC jobs.

Who are their target customer(s)

• Busy working adults in cities: Limited time for chores; want a way to keep living spaces tidy without daily pickup. Need a robot that can move through clutter and handle common items reliably.
• Parents of young children: Constant toy/clutter pickup and concern about safety or fragile items. Need gentle, compliant handling and simple spoken commands.
• Older adults or people with limited mobility: Reaching, carrying, and putting away items is difficult or risky. Need trustworthy in‑home help that is safe and predictable.
• Short‑term rental hosts and property managers: Tight turnaround between guests and variable cleaning quality/costs. Need consistent, repeatable tidying of common messes to reduce labor swings.
• Early adopters and pilot partners (tech enthusiasts, labs): Current consumer robots don’t combine reliable walking and object pickup. Willing to test imperfect prototypes in exchange for early access and input.

How would they acquire their first 10, 50, and 100 customers

• First 10: Run tightly supervised, in‑home pilots with friendly early adopters from YC networks and local contacts, with engineers on‑site to support, collect teleop/demo data, and iterate under NDAs YC profile, YC jobs.
• First 50: Expand to neighborhood pilots and partner pilots (e.g., short‑term rental hosts/property managers) with structured agreements, weekly check‑ins, and standardized reliability metrics to surface failure modes and scale data collection YC jobs, manipulation co‑op.
• First 100: Convert pilots to a paid limited release: lease hardware plus a monitoring/teleop subscription and periodic site visits, and scale via cleaning services, rental management, and eldercare partners; use AR/VR teleop tooling to keep support costs manageable Built In NYC AR/XR post, Ashby jobs.

What is the rough total addressable market

Top-down context:

Domestic/consumer service robotics is a large and growing category. Statista estimates revenue for service robots doing domestic tasks will approach roughly $23B by 2027, up from $13.5B in 2021 Statista chart. The International Federation of Robotics also reports robust growth in consumer service robots, with tens of millions of units sold and double‑digit growth, albeit based on supplier samples IFR.

Bottom-up calculation:

Initial wedge: short‑term rentals. Airbnb had about 7.7M active listings in 2023; assuming 30% are in the US, 20% are professionally managed, and 10% of those adopt at $300/month (~$3,600/year), the initial wedge is ~46,200 units × $3,600 ≈ $166M annually Airbnb Q4’23. Longer‑term household TAM: with ~127.5M U.S. households, 1% adoption at $3,600/year implies ~$4.6B in annual revenue U.S. Census QuickFacts.

Assumptions:

• Pricing model: lease/subscription around $300/month per home or unit.
• US share and professionalization rate of Airbnb inventory; 10% early adopter penetration in that segment.
• General‑population 1% adoption as a long‑run scenario, not near‑term.

Who are some of their notable competitors

• iRobot: Leader in consumer floor‑cleaning robots (vacuuming/mopping). Competes for the “reduce chores” job-to-be-done but does not do general object pickup today iRobot.
• Samsung (Bot Handy / research robots): Large‑company R&D showing household robots that can recognize and manipulate objects; currently research/demo rather than shipped consumer products Samsung Research.
• Boston Dynamics: State‑of‑the‑art legged locomotion and mobile platforms (Atlas, Spot) with deep hardware/control expertise; focused on industrial/research markets, not home tidying Boston Dynamics.
• Agility Robotics (Digit): Bipedal robot for logistics and field work (moving boxes). Overlaps in locomotion/manipulation, but targets structured commercial tasks rather than homes Agility Robotics.
• Tesla (Optimus): Developing a general‑purpose humanoid with significant engineering/manufacturing resources; still R&D/early prototype for broad tasks, not a consumer tidying product today Tesla.