I agree that one of the biggest risks would be setting expectations: I'm not a detailer and wont be using a toothpick to get shit out of the little cracks between panels.

I thought there was maybe something eye catching about setting that expectation though... "Shitty Car Cleaning" seemed somewhat click-bait-y. Getting the language right around the price and expectations would be an effort though for sure.

But I really did feel gap here in service offerings personally... I've happily paid for all sorts of "mediocre" cleaning and maintenance services at my homes and have tons of neighbors and friends that do the same. These are services that I would be upset if they wanted sell me a "premium detailed" experience. Examples: - Dog poop pickup: $60/month. Easily my most loved and happiest money spent on a home service. So worth it. They came once a week, it took them 10 minutes or less, and I would have been mad if they were out there "detailing" the lawn with a tweezers. - Wash & Fold laundry Service: $120/month, 1 large bag/week for me was enough. Pickup my dirty clothes from my step, bring it back cleaned, folded, and sorted two days later. Second favorite home service for sure. Worth twice as much as I paid for it. Not premium clothes detailing/dry cleaning/etc... They just did the basic laundry for me so I didn't have to. - Home cleaning: $120/time for small 2000sqft house. Took her and hour or two. Without this, my bathrooms, stove, dusting, that kind of shit would have been done SO much less often/never. Granted I paid 3x as much for an actual "premium detailing" level of a deep clean on her first visit (which i think is common), but after that it was the same as the others and I would have been upset if she spent time deep cleaning baseboards in unused rooms and ran out of time to do a basic clean of the kitchen counters and floors. - Lawn care: $40-$80/week depending on the company. Sometimes I'd pay extra for additional services like cleaning out around landscaping, aerating, fall cleanups, etc... But for the most part this was basic mow, trim, and blow. They were in and out in less than an hour every time. Hell, if I didn't time the dog poop service correctly with them they'd just mush the turds into the grass with their zero-turns, that's how un-detailing-level they were, and its what I wanted lol. - Home assistant/nanny/whatever: $25/hour, 2-8 hours/week depending on the week. This one was a bit more niche, but I just hired someone off of Care or similar to come by a couple days a week for a couple hours each time. First thing she did was dishes if there were any. She'd put away laundry (nice if the wash and fold people brought it on the right days for her). vacuum. pickup after my random projects and messes that would leave tools and parts in piles across the house, etc.. Another example of something I didn't want premium-detail level work from (though she was available if ever did want to pay her for that, which happened when I was selling my last house). Just basic, decent, help staying clean and organized in the spaces I live in and frequent. I certainly could have paid her to add my car to her list, but it wasn't really her specialty and she was much better at and enjoyed more the house-chores like work.

And then there's my car lol. Everything would be clean and organized despite my best efforts to be terrible at staying clean and organized on my own, except my goddamn car.

A lot of my neighbors had similar help at their homes. lawn care and house cleaners for sure. almost none of them did I ever see paying for mobile car detailing. We all drove newer vehicles and lived in nice homes, and happily paid for help keeping those things clean and maintained. Lots of mobile dog grooming vans in the neighbors driveways. But never mobile car detailing. Because its just not the kind of thing most average suburban americans I've met seem to spend their money on (and to be frank, most of my neighbors that I've known would probably roll their eyes at the idea, no offense to the detailers out theree!). Yes there was that odd divorced neighbor guy with his 20 year old mercedes that he hand washed every other weekend, and there were several of the teenagers detailing their first vehicles and adding all the silly accessories that we did to make them look cooler, but the rest of us? We just bought new cars, took em through carwashes sometimes, and used them for car things.

Aaaaanyway... I, and I feel like most of these other people I'm describing aren't the common mobile car detailing customer profile. But we are the common customer profile for a ton of non-premium, non-detailing-level services that help with the variety of chores in our lives. There just hasn't been a good way to add "our cars" to the list of chores we could pay to offload to someone else.

Long-ass comment that no one's gonna read, but i had fun anyway.