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Comment by baxtr | Hacker News Reader

I am amazed that against all common advice people still venture out into heavily competitive segments with strong incumbents. I am impressed and at the same time wonder how exactly they managed to convince investors. Would love to see their pitch deck.

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Not sure how popular it is elsewhere, but here where I live, Wolt is the most popular food delivery service by a large margin. And their service is great. For us it is like Spotify or Netflix, but for food.

The rest of the EU and world probably deserve and would appreciate a service like that.

They are the main food delivery in Slovenia and have pretty much completely taken over incumbent due to the better service and better quality application.

I honestly thought it was EU wide, but apparently their main markets are scandinavia and eastern europe.

Great service, great business model.

They go for cities where they feel like they have a chance, and where there are not already 10 other competitors. That's why they didn't go for e.g. London.

At least that was the original thinking of one of the founders, according to an article I read in some in-flight magazine.

That was indeed the original strategy. It's changing as the company grows though.

Food apps are extremely popular in central/eastern eu, here in Czechia the local DameJidlo is also a largely successful company. Wolt is now becoming a serious competitor to them, they already have a much better app.

Not to detract from your point re competition, but isn't DameJidlo one of the brands of Delivery Hero? Do they have an engineering office in Czechia?

It was sold to DeliveryHero (if that's indeed the current owner), originally a Czech company; they had a rather large engineering centre here when it was still Czech, not sure about the present. The founder went on to create Rohlik.cz

Probably a good data point that some of these delivery services are relatively local.

Something like Uber there's an advantage for travelers to have it in a bunch of different places if they already have the app installed. On the other hand, I don't even use Uber once a year locally.

Whereas with food delivery, I don't really have decent options. But, if I did, I would probably use it now and then at home. But I think it's accurate to say that I have never used food delivery while traveling.

They're also present in Central Europe but they're in no way the most popular.

Yup, even before pandemic I saw a lot of Wolt boxes in some cities, although they don't serve where I live.

I can offer this piece of insider information: Starting your business in the very high-cost-of-living Finland really helps.

(High cost of living means having to pay high fees to couriers and so on, which means it is impossible to do even do if you do not work out the economics properly right from the start, which then gives a huge advantage moving forward.)

According to various sources Finnish couriers charge somewhere between 13-14e per hour as contractors (They are not employees but self-employed entrepreneurs)

To give a reference point, cleaning contractors typically charge around 30e per hour.

Is that €30/hr what a cleaning company charges to clients, or what the workers get? Finland doesn't have a minimum wage, so I don't understand what's typical there, but it seems rather high if it's the later - in UK/France/Germany they'd get little more than €10/hr.

€30/hr would be what self-employed entrepreneur would charge from the clients (versus employee in cleaning company earns somewhere in the €10/h range.)

What cleaning company charges, then there is lots taxes and tax-like payments and cleaner gets probably that 10€/hr.

> I am amazed that against all common advice people still venture out into heavily competitive segments with strong incumbents.

"There is always room": https://archive.is/xPiWc#selection-272.98-272.100

Also, I think there are a lot of exceptions and counter examples especially in the startup world.

According to some, if you're out to build a monopoly, that's a different ball-game, and it then makes sense to steer clear of any market with competition with deep pockets (walmart) unless you've something revolutionary up your sleeve that can't be easily replicated / duplicated (amazon).

One of the most striking examples I know is facebook.com: They had fierce competition from copy-cats (vk) and other companies that had their own take on social (orkut, friendster). Some lost (path, color), others won (whatsapp, twitter), and/or are winning (tiktok).

There is always more room than one may be led to think.

Well, depends on what you compete on. Tech stack? Getting drivers? Getting customers?

Uber Eats for example cannot deliver to me, but several others can. Tech stack isn’t that expensive to build. I think it’s easy for programmers to think that the whole world revolves around tech stacks and not see how you can be innovative in getting drivers for example. Can’t really say I’m loyal to any platform when it takes less than one min to sign up for another.

It’s the same with Amazon which is just the worst shopping experience I’ve ever encountered and slow deliveries to boot and I’m very happy they have local competition that blows them out the water.

Wolt competes, in large part, on overall user experience.

An in places where there is relatively little competition because the big players have focused on juicier targets. In the Baltics for instance Wolt is doing quite well.

It’s a growing market, maybe not everywhere. It’s also hard to get right- the incumbents don’t have a good business model and may collapse in short order.

There were no strong imcumbents in the market that Wolt started in. Indeed right now Wolt is the strong incumbent, with Foodora its sole competitor if you disregard local small-scale pizza joints etc.

If there are multiple players in the market, they will either try to buy or kill the new players. Established incumbents are often not nimble enough to quickly match the newbies. If the newbies move fast and corner an important market segment, they can either replace the incumbent or be bought out by them. Both are opportunities where investors could reap big returns.

I guess investors suffer from FOMO just like the rest of us.

Google wasn’t the first search engine.

Slide 1

Food delivery: A hyper competitive, low margin, man hour intensive, inventory rotting, logistical & insurance nightmare.

On the other hand, cloud kitchens

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