The All-In Comeback: How Ken Wimberly Turned an $800K Loss Into a Business Built on Joy

Not every founder who walks through TechFW’s doors will see their original idea become the business they imagined. Sometimes, the most valuable part of the entrepreneurial journey is learning when to pivot, carrying hard-earned lessons into the next venture, and discovering an opportunity they never saw coming.

In 2018, Ken Wimberly was a TechFW member juggling two ventures: a mobile app meant to help parents capture memories for their kids, and a laundromat that started as an afterthought — a way to fill empty retail space in a shopping center he owned. He was certain the app would take off. The laundromat, he figured, was just a side hustle that might eventually benefit from the app’s success.

It went the other way entirely.

By January 2022, after pouring everything into the app, Wimberly had to shut it down. He’d lost $300,000 of his own money and half a million dollars belonging to friends. “Called seven different investors telling each one of them I lost all your money,” he recalled. “Not a little… I lost it all.”

What struck him most wasn’t the financial hit — it was what his investors said back. They told him they hadn’t just bet on the product; they’d bet on him.

“People didn’t really invest in the product, but they really invested in you,” he said. “That’s like a heavy burden to carry.”

The fallout nearly broke him. Wimberly describes six to ten months of what he calls “real dark depression” — financial strain compounding into emotional collapse, at one point admitting he was “mapping out my demise.” He credits his recovery to leaning hard on trusted peer networks, and to an unexpected diagnosis: after watching his son’s life transform once treated for ADHD, Wimberly got his own brain scanned and discovered supplement deficiencies that had been quietly wrecking his mood and energy.

“Everything was just better,” he said of the year-long process of dialing it in. Through it all, he says his wife never wavered. “She’s a saint,” he said simply.

Out of that collapse came clarity — and, unexpectedly, purpose in the business he’d never planned to build. Wimberly and his partners studied dozens of laundromats and noticed something missing everywhere: nobody was paying attention to the families waiting there, especially the kids. So they built kid zones with books, toys, and TVs behind pony walls. They started giving away backpacks stocked with school supplies every August. When floods hit San Angelo, Texas, they gave away hundreds of gift cards — and watched revenue rise instead of fall.

“The more good we do, the more good comes back to us,” Wimberly said. “I know that’s been in the Bible forever, but I can show you the numbers.”

Now expanding Laundry Luv through franchising, Wimberly calls the laundromat business “the Trojan horse for doing good” — a vehicle for impact he never could have imagined when he was chasing an app instead. Asked what he wants his children to carry forward, his answer was immediate: “I want them to live with joy. With joy, happiness, and just giving love into the world.”

For a man who once mapped out his own demise, it’s a full-circle kind of answer.

Ken’s story reminds us that progress doesn’t always look like the original business plan. At TechFW, we believe success isn't just about the companies that launch or the capital they raise. It's about helping entrepreneurs become better builders, wherever their journey takes them. And when a founder takes what they've learned, finds a new direction, and keeps building? That's a win in our book.