Tell HN: Your great ideas that you won't pursue
Note: I am not currently interested in taking up another side project so there's no alterior motive here.
Note: I am not currently interested in taking up another side project so there's no alterior motive here.
I won a hackathon with this concept and began to pursue it as a startup a year ago. The market is big, and people love comfort foods. Also, today's food delivery startups mostly focus on healthy options.
We did customer validation in Cincinnati, OH, and people seemed very interested, but we don't have the population density spots to run it here. I also don't think it'd work in New York (too many fast $1 pizza joints), or Chicago (people mostly want high quality and are willing to wait). We think it has a lot of potential in the bay, where SpoonRocket, Caviar, Sprig, etc. have paved the way.
Side note: Domino's unveiled their own cars of a similar concept in October. http://fortune.com/2015/10/22/dominos-pizza-car/
Even the premise seems a bit fuzzy: Can we deliver a pizza in 10-15 min instead of 1-2 hours? Is the problem that it takes to long to deliver or that the delivery is so varied? Maybe people cared much more about the time it is delivered than the speed? If I am told the pizza will be here at 8pm and it arrives at 8:20 I am annoyed, but if I was told it would be here at 8:20 I might be perfectly happy. The question to determine is are they losing sales because of speed or because of the accuracy of the last time they had a delivery?
But above the question based upon your existing research why not open a joint in the bay that sells high quality pizza delivered and $1 pizza if you walk in as that is clearly what the market is validating?
To gauge the size, we used a standard report from the pizza industry that a seed stage VC friend helped me find, which gave us:
- $36.7B U.S. pizza sales in 2012
- 75-77% of 18-44 year olds are pizza customers
- 410 million pizzas picked up or delivered per year
In Cincinnati, we think it's not the size of the city, but that the population is distributed in pockets that are too far apart from each other (i.e., to be simultaneously served by one pizza truck quickly).
Our consumer validation showed that what most people value in delivery is: speed (~50%), cost (~30%), and quality (~20%).
We would like to work on food tech in the future, and mostly likely in the bay, but the three of us weren't ready to leave Cincinnati yet :).
While there's no extensive data source with that info for every city, we called each pizza place around downtown Cincinnati in the evenings while we worked. We were quoted 30-90 minutes with an average wait of 43-49 minutes and a median wait of 45 minutes. Some of these were even ≤ 10-minute walk from our coworking space. One interesting observation is that chains often beat indie place quoted times by 5 minutes.
We also collected more anecdotal non-pizza data from my personal experience in the bay in 2014: I was so excited to try Caviar for the first time... and every restaurant I attempted gave a wait of 60-120 minutes or more until eventually I gave up and just walked to food.
(The free pizza was a 1" mini pizza and the rest of the order was still full price)
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1993-12-22/news/931222003...
https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answ...
2) Uber for fixing people's computers/laptops. Plenty of us are good with computers and could easily fix most problems, while 90% of people can't.
Gennardo? Or is this someone else with the same idea?
It translates in real time using your device's camera (at least on Android).
Real-Life Megaman Battle Network