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Comment by pierre | Hacker News Reader

Congrats on getting an actual business out of the ground!

A few comments :

- On your delivery website, the first step is to choose a city, but you operate just in mumbai, so I can just select mumbai. If you could remove this choice before you open in new cities, it will make the flow of ordering one step shorter. It will also allow you to better market your local brand as the wording could be : order a burger in mumbai, ....

- The pizza ordering page offer images of the items to order, the burger page does not. Is it a deliberate choice? When ordering food I generally don't choose from unknown shop with no picture (but it's maybe a cultural difference as I am not based in india).

- You are operating on top of platforms (Swiggy/Zoomato), that can decide to move into the black kitchen business. Your only edge against that seems to be your brand, what are you doing other black kitchen are not doing to ensure that your brand get strong enough?

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-good point, the direct channel website we have is built using a third party service so its not customisable. The plan is to set up our own platform where we can fully customize the flow and sell food from all our brands in a single order in the near term. Right now focus is on creating the best food.

-nope youre right , pictures are crucial in driving purchases, we'll fix that.

-interestingly Swiggy already moved into the business 2 years ago via a service called "Swiggy Access" where they created their own brands based on data. But it didnt work and they shut down all locations to shift focus back to their core business -logistics. In the longer term we plan on building brands with strong enough customer repeat rates to drive traffic to our own app/website and creating offerings exclusively available on our direct channel to reduce platform dependance.

First off, congrats on your venture! as a foodie I'm elated.

I realize that you're trying to create your own brand, my concern is:

- if it's a brand that does all cuisines, it is going to attract people mainly because of the price point, and not uniqueness

- if the idea is to build multiple brands, one each for a specific type of food: a brand for Pizza, another for Biryani, etc., then scaling each is its own demon

please correct me if I'm not understanding it right.

On a side note,

> But it didnt work and they shut down all locations

Do you have any knowledge of why it didn't work? I have a few thoughts around this, and have discussed this with a friend who's a restaurateur, but would love to hear from you!

-we're creating multiple brands -each with their own identity. The common thread is premium. Target customers are restricted to those in a 10km radius of a kitchen. Aim is to build customer wallet share by understanding our set of consumers well and serving food to them across different food missions - meal to go , family meal, light meal, cheat meal. Efficiency comes as we consolidate the supply chain and infra at scale

-they scaled too fast because it would not have moved the needle for a company of their size otherwise. and its difficult to build brands customers truly love if speed and scale is the main focus imo, we focus on depth first, then breadth. -would love you hear your views too

Not the guy you are replying too, but the strategy does seem to have parallels to D Mart growth strategy vs Big Bazaar(Future Retail) .

interesting thought!

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