Comment by samstave | Hacker News Reader

Comment by samstave | Hacker News Reader

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Not necessarily.

There needs to be real innovation on business model, but there are local services from 2000 era that are BETTER suited to today than then.

Kozmo.com is my prime example.

There is need for a local delivery site where you can find affordable delivery of anything in your area. They need to employ all the bike messengers and others, adopt the task rabbit scale of service and branch out to delivery, errands etc.. on an affordable scale.

I flew to NYC with one of the founders of Kosmo back then and expressed how much I loved the service and wished I could use maps (something like google maps which didnt exist) to be able to view various stuff near me; "Show me all indian restaurants within 1 mile" etc..

He didnt think that there was any value in such granular searching.

Anyway - I still want these services, but I think this nation needs a rude awakening on how much shit should cost.

Sam, how can i reach you via mail? Would love to talk to you about the service you describe and what we're doing at Postmates. I'm bastianlehmann@gmail.com

There actually is such a service: http://www.citymaps.com/

Please explain your last sentence.

>...Anyway - I still want these services, but I think this nation needs a rude awakening on how much shit should cost.

What I mean is that I think that everything is overpriced.

While the market seems to support current costs - I also think that costs are out of balance with value. For example, when I look for freelancers both programmers and designers - it appears that every single freelancer believes their value to be ~$200K per year, i.e. they are all asking for $100 per hour or more.

While I think that there are a lot of talented designers and programmers/developers out there, I am skeptical that EVERY one of them is worth 200K.

I also think that a lot of menial tasks seem to be overpriced.

Most task rabbits seem to want $20+ per hour, I just dont think that errands and what-not really are valued at $20 per hour, even though everyone seems to want to be paid that.

I think this is a symptom of everything being too expensive, from food to services.

I think the task rabbit price drops when the density of task rabbits is high enough in a locale to make the marginal cost drop. If I am right you should see this happen for certain tasks that don't make people deviate much from their ordinary course. Data gathering while shopping, for example, should be cheaper than delivering furniture.

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