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Comment by s1mon | Hacker News Reader

Sprig's food and delivery was pretty good at times, but the whole thing was so archetypical of venture backed insanity in SF and Silicon Valley. "We're going to throw a ton of money at X and disrupt it with our complete lack of industry knowledge and make a fraction back."

It was essentially a decent restaurant with convenient delivery, and no eat-in option. There's no magical hockey-stick growth curve to be had in the restaurant business. The marginal cost to delivery another meal or add a new customer is pretty similar at N as it is at N+1 or N+1000.

How did they get investment with that (lack of a) business model?

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I don't think that's a fair characterization. Sprig's business model was somewhat novel. It had limited menu items (like 5 choices), prepared in advance and deployed in a fully loaded truck. Nothing was made-to-order. The truck just drove around from business to business and dropped off three #4s, two #1s, etc. It only served peak meal times.

Honestly I'm not quite sure why the economics were unfavorable. It should have been cheaper and faster than any other kind of delivery food.

That's not a new concept, that's just Meals on Wheels

Fair enough. I remembered the limited menus, but I had forgotten that part of the story about the food being already on the delivery vehicle when you ordered. The marginal costs for additional orders still applies. Unless you're taking a lot of bulk orders - say for lunch at an office - each order adds food and delivery costs. There's also the risk that you make too many of something that no one wants, and it gets tossed.

With having to predict the demand, there was the issue (also coming back to me now) that they would often not have a lot of choices left after a short time. The food was sometimes very good, but it was often so-so and too much the same. Or conversely, something that was really good the last time you ordered was no longer available. All of that added up to a certainly level of frustration.

Heard of pizza delivery? Similar business.

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