loocafe

previously

400+ units deployed. 1M+ users every quarter. started at 15. built for 6 years. one of the world's most scalable public toilet models.

the problem

india has a public sanitation crisis. 600 million people lack access to safe toilets. the government builds them, but nobody maintains them. they break within months. the models that exist are either too expensive, too fragile, or too dependent on government maintenance budgets that never arrive.

what we built

loocafe is a public toilet company that generates revenue from advertising and cafe services attached to every unit. the toilet is always free. the business model sustains itself.

custom bio-digestors that work without sewage connections. stink sensors that trigger cleaning alerts. a toilet management system that tracks usage, cleaning schedules, and maintenance across hundreds of units.

deployed across multiple cities. municipal partnerships. real infrastructure that real people use every day.

the engineering

the interesting part wasn't the toilets. it was the operations layer. how do you manage 400+ distributed physical units? how do you know when something breaks? how do you route a cleaner to the right toilet at the right time?

IoT sensors, real-time dashboards, automated dispatch. the same problems that logistics companies solve, but for sanitation infrastructure in indian cities.

what's next

still contributing at distance to reflow toilets' reinvented toilet. the next phase of sanitation infrastructure. i moved on to personhood, but loocafe was the thing that taught me how to build.

six years of shipping physical products, managing municipal contracts, hiring cleaners, fixing broken units at 2am. if you want to learn how to build, build something that breaks in the rain.