Morning Coffee - Get Starbucks Straight to Your House

This seems like a curious choice of potential business when no US-based store will deliver a $3.50 product on a regular basis despite having access to large pools of labor at arbitrarily low costs, while if you're capable of typing in "git push" to get that website up your presumed opportunity cost is rather high. Consider carefully whether you are likely to have a competitive advantage in delivery operations over an entire nation of savvy chains and independent operators with high tolerance for jobs that suck. It strikes me as unlikely.

If you really, really have a burning urge to do this, be ZeroCater for coffee and sell any three startups on doing an office-wide coffee run every morning for only 15% the cost of a new engineering hire. (P.S. Note how I do not anchor costs around the price of coffee.)

It's Sunday so I've had sometime to think about this and I'd say give it a whirl, but set some goals/paramaters. I will only try this for x months or loss x amount.

I'd get creative in how you can generate revenue too besides the demand/customer few. Right now people in the comments are focusing on the scale, well it's a hard product to arbitrage, but

1) Could you sell space on the cups for ads or other start ups? This might be the one time QR codes could work!. A Well placed QR code on the cap??

2) If you try to cut your costs (ie the coffee) look into a starbucks gift registered card, every x number of coffees you buy you get a free one. Also, once you hit a certain threshold you can customize (add flavors) to cups of coffee for free. Still charge the customer for it, but you get it for no additional cost.

3) It doesn't have to be Starbucks. I'd try partnering with unique coffee shops and try cutting a deal with them. They get people aware of their coffee and grow their customer base.

4)Or just simply use this to meet people doing interesting things. Who doesn't have time to get coffee in the morning--people who are doing things. Who can offered to have someone delivery coffee to them? People who've made money doing something.

Best of luck, interested to see what you do with this!

I can't really see how this mvp can scale beyond a few dozen customers if manual delivery is going to be used (how many minutes do you have before the coffee gets cold? This sets all kinds of limitations on your business). $15 per customer/month isn't much if you're going to pay for (gas), salaries, etc.

Unless, of course, this is Starbucks' MVP and they are figuring out the parameters of coffee delivery. Now that would be brilliant.

Why Starbucks? Why not setup a barista in a street cart and make your own (and you will also be mobile to handle different areas and sell to foot traffic)? You can skip the Starbucks lines, increase your margin significantly, and work on a better coffee product.

Premium coffee is selling for $6.50 and is turning into a luxury item. Source: http://www.good.is/post/the-end-of-cheap-coffee/ (fantastic article!)

The nearest Starbucks to me is 44km away, which makes me think that if you were able to deliver, it would likely be cold. Also, I can't say that Starbucks coffee is nice - seems more like coffee flavoured milk than an actual drink. You can also make perfectly awesome coffee at home, for cheaper than your delivery cost, and you get to use your own cup.

For that reason, I'm out. Nice looking iPhone app though.

EDIT: After all the feedback, I realized I'm wrong. There is no sustainable way of delivering all that coffee at 50 cents a day. So, we've decided to change to $1.50 a day, and ramp up slower. We're starting in the D.C area, but considering moving to the Bay area if demand is significantly creater. Thank you for the help

You could:

1. bundle your offer with a subscription to a newspaper. Possibly with a large subscription purchase, you'd save enough money that your customers would get a deal for coffee AND the paper while you up the revenue.

2. add breakfast! smoothies? Breakfast burritos? Those take time, are usually pretty healthy, and are highly portable.

3. send them a morning playlist??? like a new jazz/downtempo CD of their genre preference to get ready with while they wait? If I'm busy, which is what I'm going to have to be to use your service, I probably don't spend a lot of time getting new music.

4. have really really good looking delivery people. Nothings gonna make someone get ready faster and better in the morning than that. Hire college sororities/intramural soccer teams?

5. market yourself to startups that want their folks to come in before just getting free lunch--like a jumpstarter for their day. Maybe they'd pay a bit to see if you can get their engineers in by 9:30-10. 15-20 bucks for an extra hour or two of work sounds like a stellar rate for a top flight hacker...

Honestly though man, I'd use this as a vehicle to learn about starting up and not as the roadmap. Take all the gravity out of the situation. This should be a fun experiment to learn how you and your team operates, how you adapt when you're not getting traction, nothing more.

I respect the hustle, but this most likely will not work out. If I have time to wait for you to deliver coffee, I have time to make myself some.

If I want coffee at home, I make it at home.

If I want to get coffee someplace (and in my area, for better or worse Starbucks is nearly the only option), then I'll go somewhere because I want to see something besides the same four walls and my lovely family.

Paying coffeehouse prices plus a convenience fee just to sit at home and save myself the few minutes it would take to make coffee seems like it will have a very small target market, at best.

$15 a month, seems very cheap, is it even possible to run this profitably? Who delivers them? How are they paid?

It'd be interesting you did demand delivery pricing, so that pricing became more expensive at peak times (eg: 8AM) that way you can manage the effect of everyone wanting their drink at the same time.

You should start hyper local, one neighbourhood in San Francisco - SOMA? Hayes Valley? Mission? If you did it in a hyper local area you might just turn a profit at $1.50 delivery each.

I think this would also be hugely valuable to companies, such as being able to order all my teams starbucks drinks in one click.

I'm curious why coffee though? Most people do not appear to mind getting their coffee in the morning. Especially as it is so habitual. I hate laundry though! I hate taking my trash out. I hate not getting fresh bagels/fruit each morning.

Kozmo for Coffee?

For many people, part of the point of going to a coffee shop is the social interaction and serendipitous encounters.

Good luck tho! :)

I think the best way to go about this would be to approach businesses in a small area, maybe a couple of streets, rather than targeting an entire city and advertising it online. Create a few flyers and hand them out. That way you can delivery multiple coffees at once which will make your business a lot more efficient. Another thing, if someone gets a coffee delivered for them in an office, all their colleagues will want their coffee delivered too. Word of mouth should work quite well for this business but to be successful, you'll definitely need to target businesses. Oh and finally: why not allow business accounts that let them order numerous coffees at once?

1. You don't specify a locality

2. You could scale this more easily with TaskRabbit.

3. A flat monthly rate will run you into the ground. Example: I order 10 drinks every morning delivered to my office. Or, if you limit to one drink/day, as head of this company I could buy a year of this for all of my employees, then together they remember to order on a daily basis.

Are you actually planning on buying from a shop and then delivering as everybody assumes? If you are, have you considered:

There's a step between being a Starbucks customer and being a Starbucks shop. See for example http://www.starbucks.com/business/office-coffee

I don't know how costs would improve/get worse, but I imagine it would at least be operationally easier if you could brew on the road rather than constantly having to go back to the shop, and dealing with drinks getting cold.

Potentially I can imagine them selling you branded equipment (cups, tissues etc.), coffee (just big bags) and the extras you might need (e.g. syrups), then as long as you made it well, so as not to give them a bad name, they could just leave you to it.

Think a little differently. This guy delivers bagels... http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/06/magazine/what-the-bagel-ma...

I think this app would be most effective in suburbs and not city centers. There are coffee shops everywhere (especially in NY) - it would actually waste time to wait for coffee then it would to walk down the block.

Every bubble needs a webvan.

Even at $1.50 per coffee I'm struggling to see how this will be sustainable.

I would guesstimate you're looking at 20 minutes of labour at the very least for each coffee. That includes getting to and from Starbucks, ordering, having the coffee made, and completing the transaction by delivering it to the customer.

Each person involved might earn $4.50/hour before costs...

I kept thinking the next step was a generalized, personalized, on-the-spot concierge, but this app makes me think the best path to that is to go in through some small service, like coffee, or laundry.

I like it.

Will the Google Car make these sorts of low-value home delivery businesses viable?

Coffee? You're gonna go out for THAT?

wow, a business model that bets on the lazyness of american people! where can i invest?