2 - Misinformation poisons and I’m trying to surface facts that are being overrun by a narrative.
3 - Misunderstanding one of the largest entrepreneurial & capital efforts in our lifetime, especially on HN, will inevitably slow other entrepreneurs journeys who miss the real story and how to apply these lessons themselves. That’s why I wrote the parent comment.
4 - With your “uppity” comment let’s limit the ad hominem yes?
5 - Broaden your thinking around how “eats” eventually becomes a business worth having. Research “cloud kitchen” concepts - this is an amazing space with giant scale, an unnessesarily distributed supply side (most B+ quality delivery food is more or less the same), and massive loyalty / customer LTV
2 - Depends on perspective, from my point of view the narrative on HN at the moment seems to be in your favour and you're not going against much, hence my antagonistic comment
3 - Misunderstanding implies there's merit, which you seem to be very sure of - I'm just saying be careful, this has all the signs of blowing up and if you're right it won't be because there's been writing on the wall
4 - Refer to 1), again, unfortunately I got emotional and my comment could have been written with more substance and less bullshit
5 - Talking about "cloud kitchens" just makes me feel like I'm talking to someone from a different planet.
You are probably right about my bs martyrdom on this topic, HN is better informed.
I am on planet earth although head in clouds :). But really look through the cloud lens of:
1 - people order a lot of takeout, and mostly the same thing with same frequency (Thursday is Chinese night, etc)
2 - Uber owns a lot of data around who is ordering what and when. This data is similar to amazons general product info and how they can manage the insane logistics of same day stocking, not even to mention same day delivery.
3 - setting up a massive production line kitchen in a rent efficient space (aka not retail, industrial at 30% the costs) with the same predictive models amazon uses to stock “same day” is many times more efficient than mom and pop restaurants.
4 - Transport costs can be mitigated with an Uber pool like model or a heavily tip reliant model (like Amazons prime now)
Fun fact - Travis K after leaving UBER is heavily investing time and money in cloud kitchen space.
https://techcrunch.com/2019/06/28/a-rare-glimpse-into-the-sw...
https://thespoon.tech/former-uber-ceo-lands-in-the-cloud-kit...
I agree with you on the fact that there's a huge amount of potential to improve upon existing systems of producing and delivering food to people, transporting people from point A to point B, and so on.
Where I think our opinions differ is that I'm way more cynical in the ability for these first-mover advantage companies to deliver substantial value in a way that will make them profitable and sustainable in the long run.
I may be wrong though, and no one wants to be the guy who made that Dropbox comment on HN a decade ago about why it's useless. But I stand by my opinion and when it's proven I'm wrong I will eat my words without complaining.
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/DBX?ltr=1I had an experience with a Deliveroo driver, who told me the restaurant took an hour to make the food despite saying it was ready and that's why the delivery was almost two hours late. He ended up waiting for one hour at the restaurant for them to make my order. He was asking me to make a complaint against the restaurant because there's not much he can do.
My small order for a single person, costing £7.50, took two hours out of this person's life. Now I'll admit I don't know how the system works and whether the people get paid to wait around doing nothing but I very much doubt it, and actually felt bad that I made some person trying to make a living wait an hour at a restaurant so he could use his own vehicle to deliver a burrito to me, possibly at a loss.
But yeah everything's fine, let's keep going
Kind of like how Groupon and Living Social often made these money losing deals with small businesses. Many of those businesses figured out that the one time influx of customers was not at all worth it, which is why both Groupon and Living Social are shells of their former high-flying unicorn selves.
The figure is probably about 30% on average, can be lowered to 25% or 20% for extremely desirable or high volume restaurants that have brand value and demand.
This summary is a bit out of date on the competitive landscape, but gets the basics right: https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/high-tech/our-insights/t...
But what if the goal is something else like creating a profitable, sustainable and efficient service that benefits both consumers and producers? Too boring for shareholders I guess.
All they're doing is pick up and delivery. There's no moat there and there's not a lot of untapped profit margin there. Ubereats could win in this market tomorrow and it still wouldn't be worth billions.