No matter who you are, at some point in time, we all need to use a restroom.
Now two Sacramento Drexel University students, Erin Rodriguez and Jeremy LaBelle, think they can help people find a clean restroom with their app called Toilet Valet.
“I mean nothing really dampens a day when you enter a bathroom it smells, there’s toilet water all over the floor, it’s clogged,” said Rodriguez.
The idea for the app started as an entrepreneurship class assignment.
“At the end of the class we actually pitched to a couple of investors, and we got good reviews all around,” LaBelle told FOX40.
So after the class rather than flush the idea they ran with it.
“From there we’re like lets take this a step further and make an actual business,” LaBelle said.
The app will include a review section where users will be able to recommend or warn others.
“They want to know, the bathroom i’m getting into, is it going to be dirty,” said Rodriguez.
Rodriguez said the idea for the app came from her own struggles with rheumatoid arthritis and lupus, diseases which can cause Rodriguez to have kidney infections and put her in a wheel chair while she recovers.
“Trying to find a bathroom that would fit a wheel chair and give me the privacy I needed, because I need help, kinda made me think of something like the toilet finder,” Rodriguez said.
And once their app gets up and running next spring, Rodriguez and LaBelle will actually be improving public restrooms across Sacramento.
They’ve now teamed up with a company which makes automated toilets complete with motion sensor flushers and self-cleaning features and they’ll be selling them to some big names.
“We’re talking to the Sacramento Kings, Regional Transit, even the city itself,” LaBelle said.
