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Comment by bastian | Hacker News Reader

Postmates founder here. I am subscriber to Internal Tech Emails and I couldn't help but smile reading these emails this morning. It was in 2017, around April 12th when we launched Postmates Unlimited - the subscription program that inspired all this. Now, we all know Postmates didn't win the space but some product decisions outlast a company and this was one one of them. I still remember the meeting when we decided to launch the subscription. No one had ever done it, the board thought it was nuts. It became the industry standard. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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I forgot to mention that I also remember when Apple called about a year later to tell us about their plan to charge us 30%! Amazing we prevailed.

As long as you still need Apple, prevailing is a temporary state.

Regardless of outcome, it must feel pretty good to know you and your company ended up being a keystone in corporate tech history. Very few people get to say they were at the meeting when these subscription models became the future. Historians 30 years down the road would love you if you wrote a book about your perspective on it.

Is this comment parody? I guess Poe’s Law applies, I’m genuinely mystified.

>Very few people get to say they were at the meeting when these subscription models became the future.

Yeah, it's like being at the meeting where planned obsolelense was first invented, or when a telco devised the "jump through hoops to to cancel your service" concept...

They invented the multi year "free" device and contract bundle. If you are not on one of those it is quite easy to cancel or change provider.

> No one had ever done it

WAT? Adobe launched "Creative Cloud" (which at the time was basically desktop-software-as-a-service) on July 17, 2013; if I recall correctly they had been trialing that for about 1year in Australia before deciding it's a good idea and doing the global launch. Not sure if Adobe was first, but they definitely preceded you by half a decade!

But Postmates, Uber, Lyft, etc are not really the same type of business. SaaS had been mainstream but memberships to a p2p app wasn’t really.

It isn't obvious at all why a membership would work for postmates or Uber eats but not for let's say movie pass or hypothetically Airbnb.

Could someone share their thoughts on this? When does an all you can eat type membership (or any other type) work?

I looked up Uber Eats Pass; it’s not an all you can eat subscription. It waives delivery fees and gives a percentage discount to orders. It’s more like a loyalty program you pay for, like Prime.

Sorry, all you can eat was a bad choice of words. I meant in terms if the fees that Uber Eats collects.

I'd say prime is similar because you get free shipping but clearly Amazon.com makes money on each sale so the more they sell the more they earn.

On the other hand, movie pass is a fixed price. You pay the same regardless of whether you watch one movie or a hundred. What makes Netflix work with all you can eat but not movie pass? Is there a way to know ahead of time what works with all you can eat?

SaaS was mainstream but e.g. Creative Cloud was not really SaaS - it was "we give you desktop products and you pay an yearly fee instead of the one-time cost". Adobe tried very hard to add Saas features but especially initially, the appeal was purely in the payment model (and I know a lot of individuals didn't like it! But a lot of companies did).

Arguably, Netflix started this trend even earlier - with their exclusively-subscription model for renting DVDs (something that one used to at least be able to pay-per-rental).

Forgive my confusion, but wasn't Amazon Prime started a good 10 years before that? It seems like that'd the precedent. I'm guessing I'm missing some major detail.

May be I am too naive but even if you want to limit to apps/companies providing similar kind of services, I don't think this to be something Uber/Lyft wouldn't have tried to do eventually anyway? May be others just had bigger fish to fry?

What is Postmates?

An early to market Delivery as a Service acquired by uber that delivers from a variety of retailers, not limited to food.

Also that makes up menus for restaurants, and then gets them bad reviews when the order post mates accepted hasn't been on the menu in years

I was at your presentation to Super Mondays at the end of the Difference Engine accelerator, when you demo'd Curatedby, many years ago. It's fantastic to see what you and the team you've built have achieved since then. :)

who won this space? Uber eats?

Depending on how bullish you are on the market it's either DoorDash or no one. Because DD is the frontrunner by a pretty solid margin but time will tell if the business ends up being sustainable med-term.

DoorDash operates only in the United States, Canada, Australia and Japan. [1]

Uber Eats is almost everywhere (45 countries). [2]

Also there are some very big players outside of the US, e.g. Rappi in LATAM (Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, Argentina, etc). [3]

[1] https://help.doordash.com/dashers/s/article/Where-is-DoorDas...

[2] https://help.uber.com/ubereats/article/when-and-where-is-ube...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rappi

Yeah, it’s very region-specific. Uber basically doesn’t exist in Southeast Asia. Here, Grab is king. A while back, Uber sold their SEA operations to Grab for a stake in Grab, and then I think they were trying to sell their stake to Alibaba.

DoorDash acquired Wolt late last year. [1]

With this they now also have quite a large presence in Europe.

[1] https://blog.wolt.com/hq/2021/11/09/wolt-joins-forces-with-d...

> but time will tell if the business ends up being sustainable med-term

Narrator: "it won't. As the whole American startup scene nowadays is based on the idea of losing unlimited investor money for years and decades with literally zero plans to change that"

Uber eats has a fraud problem, Doordash is the superior service. That doesn't answer your question however.

Could you say more about the fraud problem? I've used Ubereats a few times a week for a couple of years and I don't think I've had a problem, though only ever in a tier 1 city.

Cities have tiers? Anyway, in San Francisco I order food and the driver doesn't move for an hour and a half. I call in to customer support, get another driver and he drives to the other side of the city before coming back and picking up my order (I paid for priority)

Not a fraud issue but in Miami over the break I ordered food from Uber eats, I got 5 different drivers who all got assigned then dropped the order.

On doordash none of this bs ever happens.

Cities definitely have tiers in China. I guess people use a similar system elsewhere?

See eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_city for some tier rankings. They usually start with London and New York.

Yes, it's a pretty widely-used term. Eg https://www.thebalance.com/real-estate-market-tiers-5207240

> Anyway, in San Francisco I order food and the driver doesn't move for an hour and a half. I call in to customer support, get another driver and he drives to the other side of the city before coming back and picking up my order (I paid for priority)

Oh wow, that sucks. Not sure how I never experienced that, though when I was in SF I used it a bit less often than I do now (NY). If anything, I would've thought it would be way worse in NY: systems/platforms seem creakier here in general.

Seems to work just like their car service then. Driver accepts the ride, sits there for 10 minutes, and then texts you asking you to cancel (they think I don't know it hurts their stats if they're the one to cancel).

Perhaps it won't hurt their statistics if you cancel their trip, since the driver has been waiting for you for ten minutes and he can do it with confidence. I already had a bad experience with a taxi when I was still ordering transportation services on https://www.bostonexecutivelimoservice.com/new-york-city-to-... . Then I was fifteen minutes late and notified the driver in advance, but my trip was canceled due to the fact that the workload of orders was oveloaded and every car was on the bill. Apparently they had the right to do this and simply canceled my trip, since the fault was on my part and the situation was not changed by the fact that I warned the driver that I would be late. Most likely you have a similar situation and there is nothing to worry about, just order another taxi.

anecdotally i saw a huge dip in consistency across both ubereats and doordash in the back half of 2021. like orders taking 1+ hours greater than expected delivery. that being said, i've never had the problems you're citing with either on food delivery.

as for tiering, i think it's a rough estimate of the population density. getting delivery/drivers in suburbs is plain harder given their physical sparseness

Please elaborate on the fraud problem. What moat do DD have?

At least for me a driver came all the way to our house with the food and then left without dropping the food off.

Yes we got our money back, but what a pain.

I had a problem once but it turned out to be the restaurant's fault (they accepted my pick-up order, marked it as picked up and closed for the day before I got my food - all of this in the span of ~10 mins). I submitted a complaint via the app and Uber refunded me no questions asked. </shrug>

I have to wonder where the opening tag for that shrug was. Were you shrugging for the entire comment? :)

I read </shrug> as a self closing tag <shrug /> as human language is not necessarily valid XML. It is amazing how we "autocorrect" things as we read that we have to consciously stop and think what we did.

One doesn’t have to have a moat to have superior service.

Fraud from Uber or fraud from the deliveries? I uninstalled Uber eats and rather drive to pick or use any other service than touch Uber. Uber eats was one of the nastiest apps with the absolute worst UX I have tried. Germany had a website pizza.de a decade earlier and they would send faxes in the backend and even that was better.

Even plain Uber keeps trial to sell me on their subscription every single ride.

In this specific context, yes. Uber now owns Postmates and have rolled it into their Uber Eats offering.

Kind of a toss up. Doordash has more market share in US but UberEats has wider international presence and is a leader in some markets. But yes, Uber acquired Postmates at one point and is now rolling out a subscription program called UberOne that encompasses rides, eats and its nascent grocery/pharmacy offering from the cornershop acquisition.

Also depends on the metro. I think NYC is actually primarily GrubHub, Seattle and central TX are primarily UEats, but for the most part DD is a safe bet. North TX is definitely DD territory.

GrubHub hands down

In which country? There are dozens of food delivery companies all over the world. It's not a winner take all market.

Many brands are part of a holding. Like "Just Eat Takeaway.com" Which also owns Grubhub and SkipTheDishes in North America. Mostly active in Europe though.

most baller reply i have ever seen

restec-p

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWLMnX8F45M

Postmates invented subscriptions?

When you're a CEO and only hear "yes you're a genius sir!" that happens to you

They had the first food delivery subscription service among the food delivery services, such as Uber Eats, DoorDash etc, is what I believe they mean to say, not that they literally invented subscriptions.

Aside, the sibling comments are quite uncharitable, I don't see why anyone would reasonably believe that the founder invented subscriptions. If one thinks for even a second, they know this isn't true, so why not think for another second about what they really mean? I don't see the need to complain and hem and haw about how the "world's gone crazy."

I have observed over the years the IT/Tech tends to attract a lot of incredibly literal, grumpy people who do not like it when people take liberties with language.

It might be because software lives and dies on the precision of language.

It also stems from a laziness to consider where a person is coming from, other than literal reading of text. Brains become callused, or worse slightly autistic, where only precision matters.

You just have to ask yourself who is responsible when lack of precision leads to bad outcomes. If it isn't you, then meeting the other person halfway by increasing your level of precision helps.

The emotional labor of having to be fully responsible for precision is under-appreciated. That burden is where the grumpiness comes from.

It also makes for excruciatingly tedious conversation.

Luckily it’s easy to spot people who intentionally take the least charitable interpretation of a statement.

They hide behind “precision”, which is the other person’s fault when really they lack communication (griper’s fault).

It is an easy, lazy response that doesn't require much thought, and gets internet points anyway. I'm just glad HN offers a way to collapse threads because so many comments result in massive flame wars about trivial matters like syntax and word choice.

It is also a difference in culture, americans tends to praise themselfs for every small things as a big achievement. In other countries one would not even consider this as an achievement, just a standard iteration to explore.

For me as well the first content is strange, that "I've invented subscription". It is basically just applying an existing pattern from not-so-much-different other field?

indeed amazon prime is the same, gym subscription is the same etc etc. Not sure what justifies the "no one ever done it"

I found the same thing to be true back when I invented the car. It’s incredibly annoying and takes away from the conversation.

It's pretty clear from the original thread and the reply that the implication is that Postmates was the first to offer subscriptions through iOS without going through IAP, therefore bypassing Apple's 30% cut, not that they "invented subscriptions."

I might be out of touch but that doesn't seem as impressive as this thread implies.

What's impressive is that they were a small company that did something everyone thought was crazy, then all the big companies copied them.

"no one has ever done it" - it definitely sounded to me like they implied to transform something that used to be a "pay per consumption" into a "service". Which is definitely untrue, Creative Cloud preceded them by half a decade, Amazon Prime was before that, and arguably Netflix inspired everyone.

Postmates invented applying the subscription model to a pay-per-use 'gig economy' service business.

In a world with Amazon Prime, it seems hard to believe people couldn't understand subscribing to get discounts or upgraded service.

I'm trying to figure out if you are proud of this decision or not?

This is the most peculiar comment that I've ever seen on HN. Weird enough that I will post my first comment ever just to say how weird it is.

> ...I will post my first comment ever just to say how weird it is.

Your account is brand new, so this comment is doubly weird.

They probably mean that they were a lurker previously, and created the account and hence made their "first comment" for this.

Lurk more...

I am happy to hear from people with something apropos to add.

Being out of touch with the everyman isn't overly weird for a founder of a company.

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