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Comment by fasteddie | Hacker News Reader

I loved Sprig. I used to use them as my example of a favorite product when asked in interviewed. Problem: I am hungry right now and can't/don't want to cook. Solution: As the founder notes, once signed in, it was literally three taps to get food to my door really quick. Also the design was beautiful.

Doordash, UberEats, et. al have certainly (glactically) widened the variety of food I could order, but I always find myself suffering from choice anxiety when I open those up. Sprig gave me a protein and veggie I could order without thinking too hard.

I get why the food delivery model doesn't work well in the US for anyone, and I did notice Sprig's decline in food quality, but I am still sad the company is gone.

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I worked for a company that ordered Sprig everyday for lunch for a few months. It was pretty good at first, but at the time they only had something like 5-10 meals, and pretty much everyone grew tired of it within a couple months.

I realize that's a different use-case than occasionally wanting a relatively healthy meal, but wanted to add my experience.

>I always find myself suffering from choice anxiety when I open those up

This whole analysis-paralysis trend seems to be a thing not just in food delivery, but Netflix et al as well. I've lost count of the number of times I've kept scrolling through Netflix with a bunch of "okay" options at the back of my head, but searching for something better. Ditto for DoorDash.

I wonder how well an "I'm feeling lucky" button would do on a food delivery platform.

When you don't see something that's a definite "yes" after a couple minutes on Netflix, why not just stop looking? And if this happens often, why not just drop Netflix altogether? Curious about what proportion of the time Netflix is just a time pass at best. I can count the number of shows which I would recommend to a younger me who is deciding whether to watch those shows on one hand.

If you use Netflix that way, it effectively becomes a push technology.

I hate push technology, clear back to Pointcast.

The other thing that I hate about Netflix is that even when you search for a specific title, and they don't have it, they won't simply tell you that they don't have it. What they will do is bury you in listings of all their shows that have the most vague correlation to the title you actually searched for, even using just parts of random keywords.

Example: I just searched for "Dresden files". It proudly displayed "The Dresden Files" title, followed by mostly unrelated crap. Roswell? Wynonna Earp? The Greatest Events of World War II? Are you kidding me?

For the decision paralysis thing it helps to start a timer and force yourself to come to a decision by then. Or else come up with 2 or 3 decent options and then flip a coin/roll a die for the final decision.

> Problem: I am hungry right now and can't/don't want to cook

Solution: Pot noodles Solution: Learn to cook Solution: Granola bars Solution: Walk around the corner to your local taco store

Anything but "vc funded disruption of something humans have been successfully managing for thousands of years".

> humans have been successfully managing for thousands of years

That's not really a good reason to not innovate though. People have been harvesting crops manually for thousand of years, but we've improved.

> We finally got some progress on margins, but it meant degrading the product: food is fickle.

> Less money in, worse food out.

I tried Sprig a few times and really found the food quality so underwhelming that I never became a repeat customer. Maybe I caught them during this period.

How is it different than just settling on ordering from one restaurant nearby?

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