Delivery Startups Face Road Bumps in Quest to Capture Untapped Market

It is a 3-sided market with high acquisition costs and high churn on all three sides - the restaurants, the drivers and then the users.

A better business model may be to focus on one of these and provide it as a service to the others. ie. a driver/delivery network for restaurant fulfillment.

Restaurants having to set themselves up on each platform seems like a waste - there is no reason why a standards based interface for dispatch and fulfillment couldn't be built.

You can then integrate the 'best of' for each component - ex. Yelp or Google Ratings for finding restaurants & Amazon for local delivery

Being vertically integrated just doesn't feel like what this market will look like in 5-6 years - too many challenges.

The biggest problem with these business models, in the long run, is they all target the same labor supply.

This is good for wages, but bad for their margins.

Not surprising. Business to Consumer(B2C) is one of the most difficult things on earth.