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Comment by plasma | Hacker News Reader

I ran an Uber Eats-only toasted sandwich business with my brothers for a month as an experiment - we rented a small room with no shopfront, and while we were popular, realised it was difficult to grow revenue when your only source of orders was via the gatekeeper apps (Uber Eats, etc) that take a high margin, and your at the mercy of their positioning of your shop amongst others.

This makes me think anyone running a cloud kitchen is going to always be under the thumb of the apps/landlord with no way to expand revenue.

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> at the mercy of their positioning of your shop amongst others.

Maybe this is why the owner of these restaurants has so many brands. Back when phone books were a thing, you'd see businesses named "AAA Bail Bonds" or "AAA Plumbing" [0] so they would sort first in their classification. Looking at the restaurant names they used, it appears that they want at least one of their brands to appear in every cuisine category - so no matter if you're searching for Biryani, Chinese, Curry, or Kebabs, they'll have a presence on Swiggy & Zomato.

A restaurant that specializes in every possible kind of cuisine isn't likely to be good at any of them, and it appears their ratings bear that out. :)

[0] A plot point in the The Accountant movie with Ben Affleck was that he had named his business "ZZZ Accounting" so that he wouldn't get many walk-in customers.

Wasn't Zyxel named Zyxel so that it wouldn't have to compete with "AAA tech" and "1 Tech" for the first page of any catalogue, but would always be found first by people wary of name squatters that would read catalogues backwards?

That seems unlikely given that wikipedia says the company was founded in 1988 in taiwan. I doubt phonebooks in taiwan are ordered alphabetically.

The primary market of tech companies in Taiwan is not Taiwan itself.

That reminds me of the story

I Made My Shed the Top-Rated Restaurant on TripAdvisor - https://www.vice.com/en/article/434gqw/i-made-my-shed-the-to...

That guy is brilliant. If I ever have a restaurant to push on Tripadvisor or elsewhere, I know who to call. And the food pictures are just great, now imagine ehat he can do with an actually decebt restaurant!

He also social engineered his way to Paris Fashion Week with a random fake brand from the cheapest shop he could find:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/59d8v5/i-bullshitted-my-way-...

That would probably be fraud keep in mind.

They did it by faking reviews not pretty pictures

Why can’t you build an app and pamphlet your local area? Make it cheaper on your app, or more choices?

Uber hasn’t monoplized marketing.

My online ordering habits are wedded to the restaurant not the middleman. (Unlike taxi trips where I am loyal to Uber not the driver).

If a restaurant gives you a shit or good meal it is a good prediction model for your experience the next time. You can’t actually commoditize Pizza as much as you would intuitively imagine.

A blind Pizza from Uber? No thanks. Pizza from XYZ Pizza who I trust via the Uber conduit. Yes please! Via the XYZ Pizza app and save $5. Hell yes!

I'm confused why you have such completely different mindsets when it comes to taxis vs food. In both cases, the quality of the experience depends fully on the person you pick, your only indicator of quality are user reviews and Uber's only regulation is demoting people that get bad reviews or suspending them if they get reported.

So why would you trust any random person that makes an Uber driver account to drive you around, but not do the same for restaurants?

Repeat business with a driver is really hard. And at least the uber app has strong remediation and selection of drivers.

Restaurants do allow for repeat business, and apps have less remediation and less selection. Less selection is because a bad restaurant causes much less PR damage than a bad driver.

The experience of being taken on wheels from A to B is very easy to make the same. Especially when Uber requires modern cars (reliable) and drivers are chasing 5 star ratings. Everyone is friendly, offers a mint, talks if you want or stays silent if you want, drives safely and finds the destination. It is just a tighter set of requirements and judgements than with food which is way more subjective.

Taxis are (roughly) fungible. Restaurants arent. I don't care exactly which taxi driver I'm getting. I definitely care what food I'm getting.

Uber-style ratings are awful for restaurants. Uber Taxi is basically: you did your job, you get a 5. Any aggregate rating below 4.5 could just be a 0.

Uber Eats... you did your job, I got the right order, and it was delivered. Well that's just expected, you won't get any brownie points for that. What I review is the food. I have used Uber Eats probably a thousand times. I have never given anyone a 5 for their food. I want to use the whole scale. And I'm fine with occasionally eating something that I might score a 3 (using my own scale) if I'm in a hurry. But on Uber Eats (and all the other apps), absolute slop has a 4.7 rating in their app. I don't understand other people. They must be giving a 5 for something that is merely "fine" (I'm being generous here)? I'm sure there is rating manipulation going on, but it can't be that rampant. Apart from times when the order was wrong or something was missing, I stopped rating Uber Eats orders a long time ago, because that rating scale does not map well to mine.

Also, several times I have received a note in the bag saying "I hope the food is to your satisfaction and that you will give us 5 stars!". Big mistake.

I suspect for food the ratings would be much more useful as a “would you order this again” and “how often/how soon” or similar.

I’m not going to say McDonald’s is the best food in the world, but they’re always quite consistent and sometimes it’s exactly what I wanted.

Surely for an individual restaurant a website is a better fit? I’m less likely to download an app to order food from one specific place, but I may well do it via a website…

Not sure. I have done both an I think it is 50-50. I would probably recommend a site and a thin wrapping app for people who prefer that.

It's all about discovery. You like XYZ pizza; how many places did you try before finding them? How did you find XYZ pizza? Thats where these gatekeepers thrive.

Its the same as yahoo/altavista/google.

I heard some stories of a food enterprise with a bad reputation in Hong Kong does something similar, open a few takeaway only shops under different names. I guess they having a catering supply chain would help the operation a lot

I so want to hear more about this. Mad props to you and your brothers. What a great way to approach life. Do you have an in-depth blog post or podcast or something where we can learn more?

EDIT: OK this explains a lot https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32615712

No blog post, but collected some good photos of our setup, perhaps I should write my second blog post (my first was about the acquisition of my podcasting tech start-up, https://andrewda.com/blog/omny-studio-acquired for those who like stories with photos).

As per the EDIT yes one of my two brothers is a professional chef, I also completed a short course to be accredited as a food safety officer/supervisor (a requirement to run even a short term food business), spoke with Uber Eats about the onboarding process, discussed our brand/food options together, found a location in a pocket we thought would do well for that cuisine etc.

If this is of interest perhaps I can put a few little things together.

I would be totally stoked if you put anything at all together

Would love to read it too if you do end up doing a write-up.

I didn't realize such short term things are even possible. Had assumed that even a cloud/dark kitchen setup involves long term commitments

Was this in America? Can you just do that, open a delivery restaurant on a whim? I'd imagine there would be all sorts of inspections and permits that would need to be acquired first before being able to sell one toasty sandwich.

Great question, this was in Australia, we were able to obtain a temporary food license, one of my brothers is a professional chef, and we both hold the necessary food safety accreditations and had an inspection done by the council to approve the space for food preparation.

In US, it varies but is is typically required. But it’s pretty easy/quick though. Food safety training might have a testing requirement but its a couple days of reading/studying for most. Especially if you just rent space in a already permitted commercial kitchen, that’s usually the biggest hurdle.

Even if you skip it, it’s pretty low risk in short term, just dont make anyone sick/complain!

There are.

But there are also commercial kitchen spaces you can rent. They've taken care of the inspections and permits for the food preparation facilities. You pay an hourly rate to use the facilities. Then all you have to do is make sure that your employees have their food handler's permits (a simple matter) and you're good to go.

It seems like a popular strategy is to open multiple "resteraunts" out of the same kitchen. Maybe that makes the algorithm positioning issues more stable in aggregate or something.

It helps even if just because you’re unlikely to order a burger from a pizza or Chinese place, even though their kitchens are perfectly capable of making one.

Yeah, while I don't work in the food industry. As an app developer, I know what it's like to be at the mercy of ASO (for the App Store) and it's not fun.

Perhaps it makes financial sense for an existing (non-ghost) restaurants. They can expand their revenue, keep their kitchen busy, etc. So anyone from your local mom n' pop burger place to big chains (IHOP, Applebee's, etc) can run several ghost kitchen brands to increase kitchen utilization.

This is awesome. I would love to read more about this experiment if you ever though about writing a blog post or comment.

I’d love to hear; why you did it, The pros and cons, the effort vs reward.

I had thought about doing something similar for African food in my area as there is no African food on any of the apps

This is also why business that rely on Google ads suck.

Or Facebook..

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