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Comment by unohoo | Hacker News Reader

The one thing I have always wondered -- how would these companies scale ? These models work well in areas with a high population density (eg: SF, NYC, major city downtowns etc.). How well will they work when they spread out to the suburbs ?

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What's wrong with most of their users being in the major cities? Look at Craigslist.

When you sign up as a hiring person, they only have a few major cities you can sign up in. I don't reside in any of those cities, so despite having work for people, I have no use for the service, at least not yet.

courier services (aka postmates) is definitely difficult to scale in the 'burbs. And that's because of the distances, traffic etc. involved. Certain tasks on Taskrabbit could work in the suburbs, but not all. How many times do you see these kind of jobs on Craigslist ? Ikea delivery, assembling etc are fine -- but when instant gratification (Postmates, Zaarly etc.) is concerned, scaling to the suburbs will be extremely difficult.

My response to this was... essentially... "so what?" They do not need an instant gratification task runner available for every door to have scaled to a large, very profitable company.

This is no different than the scaling limits of many online media companies, in fact. 83% of the US population is in an urban center. 81% of the US population has access to broadband internet (and not all of them take advantage of that access). Netflix's addressable US market for streaming is smaller than TaskRabbit's for tasks.

Are you seriously comparing scaling these businesses with scaling online media companies ?

If dealing with logistics issues at scale would have been easy, your grocery store would have been able to deliver to your home. Do they ? No -- because its not cost efficient due to the logistics involved.

I don't think you're reading these comments in context. I'm arguing that even if they only reach the major urban areas, they'll still be a large, profitable company. You're responding that reaching beyond them is logistically difficult -- again, "so what?". If you want to answer my comment, you have to say something as to why TaskRabbit has to be available in the 'burbs to scale.

The purpose of the comparison to Netflix was to emphasize that the addressable market for your product or service need not be "every household in the nation" to be considered "at scale". It's OK for TaskRabbit to never offer all its services in every suburb -- because it's logistically difficult or impossible -- they still have the potential to be a large, profitable company without doing so. I never made a comparison between how easy or difficult it would be to grow.

Considering that others have used it for graphics work, scaling to that in the suburbs wouldn't be that difficult.

But I imagine they either don't scale to the suburbs at all, or if they do, it will be more expensive to hire people in the suburbs, reflecting the higher cost of providing the services.

It's for the same reason I doubt they will ever came to rural areas. It's okay though, not all services have to be everywhere.

Do they even need to spread to the suburbs?

that's where majority of the US population lives -- the sprawl if you may. If you simply restrict to SF/NYC and downtown areas (which in a lot of the US cities are mainly office buildings and not housing), you're not going to able to expand your business.

The majority of Americans live in cities, not suburbia - 71.2% of the U.S. population lived in urbanised areas as of 2010.

http://www.theatlanticcities.com/neighborhoods/2012/03/us-ur...

The "urbanized areas" referred to by that article are mostly subsurbs.

'According to the Census Bureau, a place is "urban" if it's a big, modest or even very small collection of people living near each other. That includes Houston, with its 4.9 million people, and Bellevue, Iowa, with its 2,543'

That counts all 4.9 million people in the Houston Metro as being "urban", which is a joke. Maybe a few hundred thousand tops live in what you might characterize as a real city environment-the vast vast majority of is suburbs

Urbanized areas contain 50 000 or more people while urban clusters have 2 500 to 50 000 people. The 71.2% figure I presented is for urbanised areas, i.e. 50 000+; including the 2 500 - 50 000 urban clusters it rises to 80.7%.

>"Maybe a few hundred thousand tops live in what you might characterize as a real city"

Manhattan alone contains 1.6 million people; your few hundred thousand tops estimate for the U.S. urban population is very short.

I think your parent referred to Houston's population only.

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